“Day Boarding School” is a term used to describe a school that accepts both day students as well as boarding students who live at the school. Almost, but not all, day boarding schools are classified as private schools. Read on to learn more.
What Is a Day Boarding School?
Boarding schools are well known as both college preparatory schools and also therapeutic boarding schools. But while in the second case, the treatment protocols require that attendees be present 24/7 during their treatment, with college preparatory schools, it may be possible to be deeply involved in the school community, while either going home after afterschool activities are complete or on weekends. Just imagine the situation for the local student otherwise: he or she might live 2 blocks from the school, but be unable to go home! This would provide a challenge for local students not faced by, for example, international students, who—at the opposite end of things—would be more likely to suffer from homesickness because their homes are so far away.
So, boarding students stay at the school and day students return to their families when not in class or pursuing afterschool activities, which are often an important part of the boarding school life. But the percentages vary a lot. At the Grier School, an all girls’ school in Tyrone, Pennsylvania, for example, 92 percent of the students board. At the Hawai’I Preparatory Academy in Kamuela, Hawaii, day and boarding students are split 50-50. Half of the 560 students are day students, attending grades K-12 and a post-graduate year. The other half are boarding students in grades 6–12 and a post-graduate year. At the Athenian School in Danville, California, on the other hand, only 14% of the students board, all of them being in grades 9–12, while the 86% of students who come and go each day are in grades 6–12.
Public Day Boarding Schools
While most schools that take boarding students are private schools, there are at least several schools that are public schools, but this is true only in exceptional situations. One such situation occurs in Vermont, where—in the towns of Lyndon Center, St. Johnsbury, Thetford Center, and Manchester—schools that were created as private schools (or independent schools, as they are referred to in Vermont) also function as the designated public school for the area.
Lyndon Institute, St. Johnsbury Academy, Thetford Academy, and Burr & Burton Academy all accept public school students from the designated “sending area, ” which consists of towns that do not operate a public high school and, instead, use one or more local independent schools to educate their high school students, paying the tuition for them. Burr and Burton Academy, for example, has eleven sending towns: Danby, Dorset, Landgrove, Londonderry, Manchester, Mt. Tabor, Peru, Stratton, Sunderland, Weston, and Winhall, Vermont. Even more unusually, Thetford Academy functions as the public high school not only for Thetford and Strafford, Vermont, but also for Lyme, New Hampshire!
Sources
http://www.boardingschoolreview.com/school_ov/school_id/244
http://www.boardingschoolreview.com/school_ov/school_id/239
http://www.boardingschoolreview.com/school_ov/school_id/443
http://www.burrburton.org/page.cfm?p=370
http://www.lyndoninstitute.org/podium/default.aspx?t=123841
http://www.thetfordacademy.org/about/admissions/
