AlexsMom,

How old is Alex?

Who pays the room and board costs at the boarding schools? The state or the parents?

I seriously considered sending my own children away to distant boarding schools on several occasions, but I decided against it. And I have no regrets about that. My family history includes the sending away of children to distant boarding schools during the high school years, and so I know there is a lasting price to pay in making that decision.

Home is special � as are loving parents who care deeply for their children. The trade-off in sending children away to boarding schools is extreme, even if it is sometimes necessary. Personally, I do not like the boarding school model.

I differ with you on another level, too. In the NAPS model, capable young people quickly find the confidence to compete intellectually in the real world by being students in the classrooms of public research universities. That is significantly different than the boarding school model in which high school students remain exclusively with other high school students throughout their high school years. NAPS creates a small high school identity that does foster same-age peer groups, but it also opens the door to a confidence building experience that would not be duplicated in a boarding school setting in my opinion.

My oldest daughter took an intensive 2nd Year Japanese language course at the University of Oregon during the summer that she turned 12. She had skipped sixth grade, and the university language course occurred during the summer after her seventh grade year. The language course taught the usual year-long three-term "2nd Year Japanese" sequence during the one summer term, so the class met for four-and-one-half hours everyday Monday through Friday for nine weeks. Classes started at 8:00 AM and went to 2:00 PM with a lunch break. For the first few days, my wife and/or I met our daughter for lunch, but after that she was on her own. We discovered later that our daughter sometimes walked downtown during her lunch break (at least ten blocks away one-way), and that sometimes she went to the university student center's video arcade room. In any case, we did not interfere with her choices. She received "A" grades throughout the summer and earned 15 university credits, and she also became very self-confident and mature in her judgments and in her ability to interact socially with others. I doubt the same outcome would have resulted in a boarding school environment in which all of her classmates would have been her same age.

My youngest daughter had a similar experience when she took two terms of 4th Year Japanese at the University of Oregon when she was a high school freshman.

NAPS would certainly serve the needs of more young people than the Oklahoma boarding school you describe. True, NAPS does not offer a dormitory option, but that does not bother me. I propose 150 NAPS sites as a starting point, but it could grow from there if it is wildly successful. In the end, every public research university in the U.S. could host a NAPS site. Why not?

Steven A. Sylwester