My kid just left private school for online, and I still don’t know what I think
I was folding clean laundry last night and tripped over the hamper, and that’s when I saw it: the navy blue wool blazer with the school crest stitched on the breast pocket, the faint brown coffee stain blotted into the left cuff. It’s the uniform my 10th grader had to buy for our local private school last August, cost $120, and he wore it a total of 12 times before we pulled him out in January. I stared at it for a minute, the crease still in the lapel from where it hung in his locker for three months, and I started thinking about that question everyone’s been tossing around lately: is a physical private school even worth it anymore, or has online school finally caught up?
We picked the physical private school for all the usual reasons. Our local public high school is crammed, 1800 kids for a building built for 1200, AP classes are capped so half the kids who want them can’t get in. My son has dyscalculia and mild social anxiety, and the private school’s brochure promised 12 kids per class, dedicated learning support, “nurturing the whole student”. We tightened our budget, cut our yearly beach trip down to a long weekend camping an hour away, and made it work. I did carpool every other Tuesday, burned half the chocolate chip cookies I brought to the fall bake sale, and stood around the gym drinking lukewarm coffee listening to other moms talk about their family ski trips to Aspen. It was fine, mostly, but it was also exhausting in a hundred small ways I didn’t expect.
Everything shifted last December, when he had a full panic attack before midterms. He woke up crying at 6am, couldn’t catch his breath, and said he couldn’t step foot in the building. The school agreed to let him do that first week online as a temporary accommodation, just to get through exams. That’s when we saw what we’d been missing. He slept until 8, took his tests one at a time, walked the dog for 20 minutes between exams instead of being herded down crowded hallways from one class to the next. When he was done, his grades were actually better than they’d been all fall. Then the head of upper school called and said if he wanted to stay online longer than a month, that wasn’t allowed—said it would set a bad example for other kids who might “want to avoid coming in for bad reasons”. That’s the actual line she used. I was too shocked to argue back at the time, which is awkward, but that’s how it went.
We looked around, found an accredited online private high school, signed him up, and it cost half the tuition of the in-person one. It’s been four months now, and I’m still struck by how much online school has improved from the weird, clunky distance learning we all did during the pandemic. His math teacher, who specializes in dyscalculia, does a 15-minute one-on-one check-in every single week. At the old school, he went a whole semester without ever talking to his math teacher one on one. If he doesn’t get a concept, he can rewatch the lecture at 10pm, when he’s actually focused, instead of squinting at the board at 8am when he’s half asleep. The first parent-teacher conference, I logged on in my cat pajama pants because I forgot to change after my morning walk, and my kid’s English teacher laughed and said she was wearing matching unicorn pajama pants. No stuffy office, no awkward small talk over a desk that’s too small. It was just… easy.
But that doesn’t mean it’s all better. There are gaps, big and small. He spilled iodine all over our kitchen counter two weeks ago from his at-home chemistry lab kit, and the stain’s still there, no matter how much bleach I use. That’s not the big loss, though. The big loss is the messy, random in-person stuff that you can’t replicate through a screen. He used to go to after-school basketball games with his one friend, even though he didn’t play, just to get $1 popcorn and tease each other about the bad cheerleading routines. Now they game together every night, and that’s fun, but he said last week “it’s weird not having a place that’s just mine, that’s not home, that’s not mom’s kitchen”. I get that. Last month I went to pick up his transcript from the old school, and I walked past the art room, and there was a student show up, all the kids’ mugs and bowls lined up on shelves, the smell of clay and glaze floating out into the hall, and I got this weird ache in my chest. Did I rob him of that? He loved art at the old school. His online art class is fine, but there’s no group glaze firing, no standing around chatting while you wait for your turn to use the wheel.
The head of school stopped me when I was leaving that day, said she was sorry it didn’t work out, that “socialization is irreplaceable in online settings”. I just nodded and smiled, because I didn’t have the energy to say that the socialization at her school was half my kid getting made fun of for wearing thrifted hoodies instead of the expensive name brand ones all the other kids had. It’s not like in-person private schools are all perfect, warm, nurturing places. A lot of them are just fancy pressure cookers with fancy uniforms.
I don’t have a clean answer. I think online has caught up, honestly, in all the ways that matter most. The academics are solid, the support can be way better than what you get at a lot of pricey in-person private schools, especially if you need flexibility for mental health or learning differences. But it hasn’t replaced the messy, random, good and bad in-person stuff that physical schools give you. If you have the extra money, and your kid fits in, and they love being around people every day, then yeah, it’s still worth it. If your kid is like mine, who gets overwhelmed by crowds and noise and 6:30am wake-ups, online is more than good enough now.
I folded the blazer last night, put it back on the top shelf of the closet instead of donating it. My kid came in, saw me holding it, and said “I don’t miss getting up at 6:30, but I miss Ms. Lee’s art class”. So I looked up community art classes at the rec center down the street, there’s one on Saturday mornings for teens. I showed him, he said yeah, that sounds good. That’s the best I can do, I guess. No perfect choices, no one-size-fits-all answer. I’m still just figuring it out as I go.
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