Spotlight on Sports

All About Schools with Riding Programs

Does your son or daughter ride? Are you considering finding a private school that will suit your academic requirements and your child's penchant for riding?

After all, your daughter began riding in seventh grade. One of your neighbors had a small stable with a couple of horses. She had ridden professionally years ago. Now that she was retired, she had taken on a few riding students and was showing them how to ride and take care of the horses. Your daughter has participated in several shows and loves riding. So, it makes sense to find a school that will allow her to enjoy her riding and give her the college preparatory academic curriculum that she needs.

A quick search of Boarding School Review for schools offering equestrian programs yielded a list of 67 schools. After you filter that list for location, religion, and size, as well as any other criteria that matter to you, you can come up with a short list of schools to visit and evaluate. In the meantime, let's look at ten of the schools in my search results so that you can get an idea of what is available. We will inspect schools that have their own equestrian facilities as opposed to schools that offer riding programs based at a local stable not located on campus.

Chatham Hall School, Chatham, Virginia

I personally always thought that the Litchfield Hills in Connecticut are as beautiful

I have targeted the first three questions at parents just starting to think about private school for their children. I can remember what it was like when we looked into sending our eldest daughter to preschool. We had two primary concerns: paying for her schooling and understanding what the school would teach her. I know that parents today essentially have the same concerns. Possibly, the last two questions might stump people familiar with private schools. I intend to offer some facts and figures as I compare private schools with public schools.

1. How many private schools offer financial aid?

The short answer is that just about every private school offers some form of financial aid. They do that because they are well aware that many families cannot afford to pay the full tuition and fees that they charge. Also, they don't want to admit only children from families who can afford to send them to private schools. Most private schools want to have as diverse a student body as possible. Consequently, there are over a dozen schools that now offer total financial aid to families with incomes below a certain income. These thresholds vary from school to school but typically are in the $75,000 range.

This video offers an overview of Brewster Academy.

I am saving the best for last. The United States has a handful of free private schools. A dozen

New York Times columnist Frank Bruni has written a very useful book about college admissions entitled Where You Go Is Not Who You Will Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania. As you can see from the title, Bruni's audience is parents and possibly students who are considering and applying to college. Yet, as I read the book, I began to see many similarities between private K-12 school admissions and college admissions. I suggest that you read this book, which will clarify your thinking as you go through the process of selecting a private school for your child. Bruni's insights will also prepare you for the months and years ahead when you and your child will be dealing with the mysteries of college admissions. In the meantime, let's look at some of the things about college admissions that Frank Bruni points out, which are remarkably similar to what we will find in private school admissions.

Treatment of legacies

Affirmative Action for the Rich: Legacy Preferences in College Admissions by Richard D. Kahlenberg and The Price of Admission by Daniel Golden are two additional books about legacy admissions. These authors go into great detail and cite many sources to support their arguments.

What is a legacy? A legacy is an applicant to a school who has a relative or relatives who attended the same school. You will find legacies in both private K-12 schools as well as at the college level. Kahlenberg and Golden

First of all, let's define competitive. At its most basic level, a competitive boarding school is one that admits fewer applicants than it receives applications from. For example, a school has a fixed admissions deadline of January 31 each year. Last year it received 250 applications for 100 places. That means that 150 applicants were not accepted by the school. Perhaps some of them were put on the waiting list but we will look at that later.

So, essentially a competitive boarding school receives more applicants than it has places which it can offer to those applicants. Within the scope of competitive schools are several subsets. There is nothing official here, of course, as no organization will officially state that such and such a school is a highly competitive school or a less competitive school and so on. Having said that, you do not have to know a lot about private schools to look at the data which our site Boarding School Review offers after doing a little sorting of acceptance rates.

The other filter which we have to apply is for admissions to special schools. These schools which specialize in teaching students with learning disabilities, for example, have acceptance rates that are generally subject to other variables. In most cases, we will classify these as non-competitive.

So, where are we going to set the bar? Anything below a 25% acceptance rate is very competitive. 26-50% is competitive. 51-75% is less competitive. Individual educational consultants will have