What Is It Like to Attend an Independent School: A Parent’s Firsthand Experience
Last Tuesday, I pulled into the car line at my son Leo’s school, and he came barreling toward me holding a dented mason jar full of murky pond water and wiggly tadpoles. “Ms. Riley said I can keep them over spring break to watch them metamorphose,” he yelled, climbing over the center console to set the jar on my floor mat, mud dripping onto my carpeting. “Move your bag, mom, don’t crush them.”
Three years ago, this would have been unthinkable. Back when Leo was in second grade at our local public school, he came home every day complaining that school was boring. He finished his work in 10 minutes, then spent the rest of class drawing dinosaurs in his notebook and distracting his neighbors, which got him sent to the office at least once a week. We tried everything: extra work from the teacher, a reward chart for good behavior, nothing stuck. A friend suggested we look at the small independent K-8 across town, and I laughed at first— I assumed independent school was for wealthy families who needed a resume boost for high school, not for a bored 7-year-old whose parents both work non-wage nonprofit jobs. But it turned out they had sliding scale tuition and financial aid, so we applied, and here we are.
Most of what you hear about independent school is either that it’s a privileged bubble or that it’s a magic fix for every learning issue. Neither is true, from what I’ve seen. At our first parent-teacher conference, Ms. Riley didn’t pull out a test score sheet or a list of grade-level standards. She pulled out a small spiral notebook full of handwritten notes: Leo spends 20 minutes every recess rearranging the rock garden by the entrance. He explained ant colony communication to a group of first graders last week after they found a nest on the playground. He crumples up his reading worksheets when they’re too easy, but he’ll sit for an hour reading about frog life cycles for fun. I left that meeting crying, because no teacher had ever watched him that closely before.
It’s not all tadpoles and rock gardens, though. Last fall, Leo had a group project on local logging history, and two of the three kids in his group dropped the ball—one forgot to bring his photos, the other dropped out to go on a family vacation a week before the due date. Leo came home slamming his backpack, mad enough to spit. “Ms. Riley just sat there and asked us what we were going to do about it!” he said. “Why can’t she just give us an extension or reassign the group?” That’s the thing no one tells you about many small independent schools: they don’t step in to fix every small problem for you. At his old school, the teacher would have split the project back into individual assignments to avoid stress. Here, the expectation is that kids work through the conflict themselves. After an hour of moping, Leo called the remaining group member, they split the missing work, and they ended up presenting their project at the local historical society’s open house that winter. It was a hard lesson, but it stuck way more than any teacher-led lesson would have.
If you’re a parent considering an independent school for your kid, there are a few concrete things I tell people to check before you apply, that you won’t see on the website. First, instead of asking about average test scores or college acceptance rates (which don’t matter for elementary school anyway), ask a teacher what’s the last thing they changed about their lesson plan because a kid showed interest in it. At our school, the answer will be something like “we spent an extra week on volcanoes because half the class got obsessed after a trip to the natural history museum.” That’s the autonomy that makes independent school different, not just smaller class sizes. Second, ask explicitly about support for whatever your kid needs. If your kid has a learning disability that requires a full-time aide, most small independent schools don’t have the budget to provide that, even if they want to. We got lucky, Leo only needed more flexibility for his advanced learning, which is easy to accommodate, but that’s not the case for every kid. Third, ask about what extracurriculars they actually offer. Because our school is small, there’s no football team, no debate club, no marching band. If your kid is obsessed with competitive soccer, you’ll have to do it through a city league, which adds extra cost and time on top of tuition.
We still have plenty of worries. Tuition goes up every year, and some months we skip takeout and cut back on grocery runs to make the payment. Leo is in fifth grade now, and we’re trying to decide if we stay for middle school or go back to public for the bigger sports teams and more social options. Last month, Leo had a falling out with his best friend, and because there are only 12 kids in his class, there weren’t a lot of other open friend groups to join. For two weeks, he ate lunch with the librarian in the office, which broke my heart a little.
But right now, when he comes home with muddy jeans, a jar of tadpoles on the counter, and a plan to build a frog pond in our backyard for when they metamorphose, I know it’s the right fit for us right now. It’s not better than public school, it’s just different. It doesn’t fix all the hard parts of being a kid, or being a parent paying for school. Next year we might decide it’s not working anymore, and that’s okay. For now, though, I’m just going to wipe the mud off my car seat and remember the last time Leo came home excited to talk about school, instead of bored and ready to turn the TV on. That’s enough for me.
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