This is intended as an FYI for parents with younger gifted students who are feel they are out of options.

Cym and possibly Ania have mentioned in the past that their (7th or 8th grade) sons had received a lot of solicitation from college prep boarding schools after scoring well on a either the ACT or SAT for a Talent Search. My ds did pretty well on the math section of the SAT last Mar while in 7th, but lower than many kids here, by the way. He must have cleared a particular threshold because he is receiving one or two offers per week to compete for scholarships from east coast and midwest schools.

I know these solicitations are primarily to generate interest and recruit qualified paying students for these schools. However, the full and partial scholarships are real. They also offer financial aid, which is as good as a scholarship in my opinion. Some schools give out millions in financial aid each year as they have a long established endowment just like the colleges. This is how President Obama received his education, right?

Advanced planning and action is required to gain acceptance to these schools with even more required to compete for a full scholarship, but your child only has to take the ISEE once and could apply revisions of the same essays to different applications in many cases. Also,the interview experience could be great practice for college.

Thank you for the information, delbows!

Hmm, I wonder why my son didn't get any solicitations. He made SET last year, but we didn't get anything like this. Maybe because he identified himself as a homeschooler?

Another possible reason is that you used a different talent search or no talent search. Some of the brochures specifically reference that his accomplishment on the NUMATS talent search �did not go unnoticed�. Additionally, they are all high schools, so this is the season to apply. If your son is annotated as being in 7th this year or as already in high school they may have missed him.

If you are interested in a boarding school for him, I am sure they would gladly send the application and scholarship information!

Congratulations to your son for making SET! Was it for his verbal or math score?

My son will give it a shot on the OCT test (for math), but unfortunately it is just after his 13th birthday, so it would be a long shot at best as he is only in geometry this year!

Dottie, Delbows, DS says he ignored the little box. That must be the reason he hasn't received anything! It's probably better that we didn't get the offers. I am thinking how easy it would be for me if he did attend a boarding school... but that isn't what ds wants to do. I guess for now we'll continue with homeschooling and part time college. As he gets older, the shuttling him around is getting old too!


Good luck to your ds, delbows! I'm sure he'll do great!

We just got one of these solicitations as well. Dd is a 7th grader. I believe that the reason she got it was not how she performed on the talent search testing but b/c RMATS/WATS sells their mailing list to other organizations that may be interested in reaching high achieving students unless you specifically opt out.

Ditto on both, although I�m just the driver, not his teacher! DS will not even consider applying to our state math and science academy because it is at least four hours away.


We will see. He has yet to finish any section of the SAT or ACT in the allotted time.

Again though, the scholarships ARE real and so is the financial aid! Good luck to those who apply.

As a gifted student who got a scholarship to one of these schools when I was younger, I would suggest looking at the curriculums and being very careful. I worked about as hard in the CP school as I did in public, which is to say almost none at all. The courses were somewhat more enriching. Toughness was based on amount of homework and on strict adherence to their curriculums. This was a cp rated very highly in my State. Granted, I got into a really good university, but I was still completely unprepared with the study skills I needed to succeed there.

lol! That sounds like my older dd.

I didn't mean to imply that they weren't. Sorry if my prior post implied that. I'm just not sure that my dd is testing nearly as high as some of yours are on talent search testing, but she seems to be winding up on these types of mailing lists as well. I don't think that these types of opportunities are available only for the top of the top type of kids.

No, you really didn�t Cricket. I just didn�t want the original purpose of the post to become lost. Many of these schools are excellent and could be a wonderful opportunity for a gifted child who is otherwise stuck with a mediocre public option (our local high school, for example, has no AP courses at all).

Another great benefit is that some of these schools are fantastic in securing college academic scholarships for their graduates.

Our daughter�s school (college prep parochial day school) received over 10.7 million in academic scholarships for the class of 2008, which consisted of 98 students. This was before any type of athletic scholarship or financial aid.

Last year was less, but still almost 8 million in offers for ~ 100 students.

They do not send students off the tippy top colleges every year, but plenty of names that land in the top 25-100 slots on any given list admit them each year.

We consider her school an incredible value.

Here are two articles regarding private schools and boarding schools that were distributed by DITD to YSer families this week.

http://www.connectionnewspapers.com/article.asp?article=332256&paper=73&cat=104

http://www.thenewstribune.com/331/story/865824.html?storylink=omni_popular