Many U.S. cities offer a good variety of high-quality schools, which means a great many choices confront families with school-aged children. Even assuming the family decides to forego the public system to explore the independent/fee-paying school world, there are still many decisions to be made: religious vs. secular, coed vs. single sex, large vs. small, traditional vs. progressive, etc. As if that isn’t enough, families also have to decide if they want to enroll their children in a school that starts in kindergarten and continues all the way through to 12th grade, or choose a school that would take children from kindergarten to 5th or 8th grade, which would then be followed by yet another search process to choose the right high school.
Not surprisingly, many families’ first instinct is to favor a K-12 school. Such a choice offers the promise of continuity—the child has the opportunity to progress through the grades with the same peer group and school environment from the age of 5 to the age of 17. And of course, for many families the school selection process at the kindergarten level is burdensome enough; the prospect of repeating it at 8th grade is just unthinkable.
But there are good arguments to be made for choosing a K-8 school, despite the need for that high school search at the beginning of 8th grade. It is the choice that my family made, living in New York City, and with both daughters now thriving at university, we are very glad we did.
Perhaps the most important factor to keep in mind is that your 12-year-old child is not the person that she was when she was five and you were looking for a kindergarten. If you—and your school—have done your jobs right, by the beginning of eighth grade, she is a young woman with distinct likes and dislikes, a particular learning style, and some strongly held opinions. And if you have more than one child, you are likely to discover that, despite using the same parenting techniques on all of them, they often grow up very differently. When it was time for my oldest daughter to choose a high school, she selected an all-girls school in a wealthy neighborhood on Manhattan’s upper east side. It was the sort of quintessential NY private school with a storied history, a dress code, decades-old traditions, and an aura of wealth and privilege that I sometimes wished wasn’t quite so conspicuous. Her younger sister on the other hand, chose a coed school in far-off Brooklyn, a place with a bohemian atmosphere where teachers were called by their first names and the students wore what they wished.
Looking back to when they were in kindergarten, I would not have thought of either school for either girl, but the important thing was that eight years later, they did. They both loved the schools they had chosen and thrived in them.
One of the risks of a K-12 school is that it may put a disproportionate share of resources into the upper grades, ensuring that high school students are perceived to be successful when they graduate. This means that, on occasion, the lower grades are short-changed. When 8th grade is the top grade level, the school’s "extra" focus can be on those children and their success.
It also means that 8th grade students have the opportunity to experience life as the most senior students in the school—the leaders, the big kids on the block— with the responsibilities and status that go with it. Most K-8 schools do a good job of incorporating that sense of responsibility into the experience of their oldest students: eighth graders are Presidents of the student government, editors of the newspaper and yearbook, leaders of clubs and affinity groups. This facilitates a wonderful process of maturation during what can often be some challenging teen years.
We also found that the transition to a new school and a new peer group for 9th grade was good practice for life after high school. By the time our girls were heading off to their chosen universities, the prospect of starting out at a new school with a new peer group in a far-away place was not intimidating or frightening in the least. When I offered to accompany my younger daughter to make sure she would be settled-in for her freshman year at college, she looked at me with a warm smile and said, “Nah, thanks, but I got this, Dad.”
When trying to find the right school for your child, consider some of the advantages offered by K-8 schools.
Timothy Dwyer, President
Over the years, Bennett International Education Consultancy has worked with hundreds of corporations across the globe, many of them Fortune 500 companies, providing domestic and international school advisement & placement services - preschool through university - to the dependents of relocating employees. In addition to education placement, our team provides customized consulting for corporations with a range of education issues: education policy writing & benchmarking, tuition studies, group move advisement & planning, and remote education solutions.