The Foreign Service Journal, December 2018

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | DECEMBER 2018 111 T he reasons parents chose the boarding school route are as varied as the students themselves: unsuit- able schooling at post, special needs support, gifted student opportunities and the need for stability have all been regularly cited. In my conversations with these parents, one thing that most have in common is that boarding school was not part of their child’s long-term education plan. Something happened, and suddenly boarding school was an option they needed to evaluate quickly! Such was the case with us when we learned in 2014 that our next post was going to be Beijing.While the international schools there look great, the requisite language programmy wife would enter meant that our oldest daughter would end up attending three different schools during her last three years of high school—a very unappealing proposition to any teenager. We jointly decided that boarding school in the United States would be the best option for her, and I began to quickly learn as much as I could about the process. I spoke with the State Department’s Family Liaison Office and the Office of Allowances, and I networked with as many boarding school parents as I could find. (The Facebook page “AAFSWBoarding School Parents,” for which I am an adminis- trator, was unfortunately not yet in existence, but is now a great network and resource.) I also did a lot of research online. Ultimately, she applied to five schools in New England, interviewed on campus at each of them, and waited patiently. We were very optimistic, as she was an honor student with great grades, very strong test scores and lots of extracurricu- lar success. To our surprise, she was admitted to only one school and waitlisted at the other four. Despite all of our research, we discovered a number of key things about the boarding school application process too late. I hope a few of these lessons will be helpful to those in the Foreign Service thinking about boarding school in the future. John F. Krotzer is a Foreign Service family member and, most recently, the community liaison officer at Consulate Mumbai. He and his family are now in Beijing. The complete article appeared in the June 2016 FSJ . FROM JUNE 2016 FSJ EDUCATION SUPPLEMENT Applying to Boarding School: Lessons Learned BY JOHN F. KROTZER