Has the Boarding Academy model run its course?

[tall73]

We see in many places boarding academies that are struggling to survive. Some conferences have multiple ones, but there are strong ties to each one--and donors would hurt the conference if they closed them.

The questions I see are

a. is boarding school the only Christian education solution?
b. has technology enabled new methods?
c. is it a good idea to leave 14-18 year olds under the supervision of on-call staff?
d. are the academies still training places for workers? Or are they an Adventist military school? Or worse, are they just the expected place to send kids? Are they really turning out better Christians? Or cultural Adventists? Or ...from a negative perspective...people who learn to get around all the rules that they really don't want anyway?
e. Is homeschooling Christian education?
f. How can small areas have Christian education without the academies?
g. are academies simply becoming too expensive, for the church and the members, and draining funds for evangelism? Is there a line to sacrifice? What do you do with Ellen White's advice to avoid debt? Or the Bible's call to let no debt remain outstanding except a debt of love?: (note...I have debt too...partly from school, and partly from cars etc...just asking the question, I don't have all the answers). Our current academy bill is around 11k per year. College at the SDA university I went to is about 19k. That is about 120 k per student lifetime IF the prices stayed static...which they don't. It is over 40 k just for academy. While churches should help out the poorer families, let's be honest, that doesn't always happen to the degree it should. And Academies worthy student funds have trouble stretching.
i. Is there any way to reform some of the moral ills at academy? Is there a forum to address these concerns in your local field?
f. Should parents who are doing a good job of raising moral kids send them to academy where they have less control? How do we simultaneously minister to those from very worldly homes, and those from Christian homes, without risking corrupting the latter? Which world view winds up prevailing?
g. Do we lose whole generations in the local church because we ship them away at just the time they would be taking on responsibility and leadership? How do we train them in the local church when they are so far away? Many never come back.

What are the overall strengths and weaknesses of academy?

I honestly struggle with this thought a lot. I am a denominational employee. I feel strongly that we need Christian education. But I am not sure that the academy at this time is the way to go. Some of these questions are ones I routinely get from parents.

I am not trying to be unsupportive. I donate to my academy, support the kids there, and realize that it does have some positives. But I sometimes feel we won't even look at other options because the ties are too strong.

For now I have the luxury of having children who are not yet old enough to attend academy. But the time is coming.

For full disclosure, I did not go to academy. My family was not that into religion. I did however get to go to an SDA college. Some of the same arguments could be used for the colleges, but that is perhaps a different discussion with different dynamics.

What do you all think?

 

[StormyOne]

I went to a boarding academy... I loved it... but I think their time is about past... I cannot envision me ever sending my kids to a boarding academy though my experience overall was good.....

I think its too expensive, and in today's climate, too much at stake..... I am thinking just from the aspect of safety. Too much can go wrong....

 

[tall73]

Ah, I forgot one of the biggest to me.

The kids leave the church right as they would be taking on responsibilities, learning from older more experienced workers, and really becoming the backbone of the church.

I look at churches around me that have tons of young people and wonder, why do we send out our best workers/future when they often don't come back? And when they do come back, many times they are disenchanted about the home church.

 

[payattention]

One has to question the wisdom of sending children to others at the most impressionable period of their lives. This is when they should be closest to their parents.

 

[tall73]

One has to question the wisdom of sending children to others at the most impressionable period of their lives. This is when they should be closest to their parents.

I think technically the most impressionable would be age 1-6 or so, but I definitely agree with your overall point. They face many pressures and make a lot of decisions then. That is pretty hard to entrust to someone on call. Especially when some parents have the idea that the reason to send them to the Academy is to fix what they couldn't with two (sometimes) parents in the house to start with.

 

[payattention]

I think technically the most impressionable would be age 1-6 or so, but I definitely agree with your overall point.

"Impressionable" was the wrong word.

 

[Sophia7]

I did not attend an academy; I went to public high school, so the only knowledge I have of academies comes from what other people have said and what I have observed from brief visits. When I went to an Adventist college, I had several friends who went to academy, and they constantly talked about all of the academy students who were always looking for ways to break the rules without getting caught. Most of their classmates ended up leaving the church after academy.

More recently, I have observed the academy situation from the perspective of a pastor's wife. In an academy newsletter sent out to the whole conference one year, a graduating senior wrote that the most important thing he had learned at academy was how to get around the rules. That really disturbed me.

The more I hear from current students about the problems at our particular academy, the more resolved I am never to send my kids to one. I know that there have always been problems, but it does seem somewhat worse since the advent of computers and the Internet. Pornography is a huge problem. Also, we have reports of students at our academy practicing Wicca. These are things that I was never exposed to growing up, even in public school. I went to a fairly small and conservative high school, where the main problems kids had were smoking and drinking and a few teenage pregnancies. I know that many public schools are worse than that, but academies don't seem to be any better.

One of the things that troubles me about this is that most parents probably are not aware that these things are going on at our academies. They send their kids there to be sheltered from the world, but the world is there, too. Parents often fail in their responsibility to give spiritual guidance to their children and then send them to academy to straighten them out. However, all these kids seem to get out of their experience is that religion is about doing all the right things and following all the rules. Why spend thousands of dollars a year to send kids to a Christian school where very few of the students are really Christians? At least in public school people don't usually pretend to be Christians if they're not.

Also, peer pressure seems much more intense when kids live with each other all the time, with no parents around and only a dean on duty to try to enforce the rules. I don't want my children in that environment. I want to teach my kids about God myself. I want to know what they're doing after school. I want to supervise their computer use.

Internet pornography is a terribly insidious and destructive problem, and I want to know what my kids are looking at. Unfortunately, most Christians don't even seem to care about this issue. Academy staff members don't seem inclined to do much about it.

Another thing that has always bothered me about the academy situation is the way male/female relationships are handled. The usual policy of no touching at all seems unrealistic and inconsistent to me when boys and girls are encouraged to date (at banquets and such) but have no healthy outlets for expressing affection. On some academy campuses, the only place girls and boys can associate is right in the middle of the campus where they are in plain view from the windows of every building.

Personally, I don't plan to let my kids date when they are 15 or 16. (I didn't date in high school, and I'm glad that I didn't.) I know that sounds strict, but what's the point of letting them date in academy but not letting them have any physical contact at all and punishing them when they do, which only further encourages them to sneak around? Who teaches them healthy principles of relationships? Certainly not their friends, whom they live with and share pornographic pictures with. And not the staff, whose main job often seems to be policing the campus to prevent people from having sex.

The sad part is that probably the only way to motivate change on some of these issues to withdraw financial support, either by removing/not sending students or by not sending donations.

I really think that we need a new model for Christian education, especially since fewer and fewer parents are electing to send their children to academy. The boarding-school model doesn't seem to be working. I think that we should incorporate more distance-learning programs in our local church schools so that our kids could attend Christian schools but still live at home with their parents. I don't want to send my kids to public school either, so I would consider home schooling if that were my only option, but most parents probably wouldn't consider that.

 

[StormyOne]

Sophia,
When you say let your kids date, what do you mean?

 

[tall73]

No dating....it means, no regular relationship with the opposite sex, and probably not hanging around the opposite sex out of a classroom/school, extra-cirricular (monitored) setting. Limited if any visits to our house by opposite sex friends, and limited if any visists to said friends house.

 

[StormyOne]

No dating....it means, no regular relationship with the opposite sex, and probably not hanging around the opposite sex out of a classroom/school, extra-cirricular (monitored) setting. Limited if any visits to our house by opposite sex friends, and limited if any visists to said friends house.

Phone calls? What about hanging out at the mall?

 

[tall73]

Probably no internet chat, or whatever they have by then, and a cell phone hard wired to call 911 and the mall, which they already have.

Call us paranoid, but hey, I didn't have any cell phones or chat growing up, and I survived just fine. And my parents didn't let me interact with the opposite sex without monitoring either.

 

[StormyOne]

Probably no internet chat, or whatever they have by then, and a cell phone hard wired to call 911 and the mall, which they already have.

Call us paranoid, but hey, I didn't have any cell phones or chat growing up, and I survived just fine. And my parents didn't let me interact with the opposite sex without monitoring either.

You may be paranoid, but that's neither here nor there....I was just inquiring.... if you plan to stick to that, then it's best you never send your kids to a boarding academy, or school for that matter.... no field trips, bible conferences, campmeetings, etc.... for all of those things provide opportunities for kids to hang out.....

 

[tall73]

You may be paranoid, but that's neither here nor there....I was just inquiring.... if you plan to stick to that, then it's best you never send your kids to a boarding academy, or school for that matter.... no field trips, bible conferences, campmeetings, etc.... for all of those things provide opportunities for kids to hang out.....

Note the monitored/supervised part.

 

[HoneyDew]

I never went to any Adventists schools. My mom tried for a nanosecond and changed her mind as she was taking me through the school gates. We had heard just too many horror stories. That plus I was bawling the entire time. I knew that all of my peers felt that the Adventist school system was woefully outdated and it was only for the "dunce bats," as we unkindly called them.

 

[Sophia7]

You may be paranoid, but that's neither here nor there....I was just inquiring.... if you plan to stick to that, then it's best you never send your kids to a boarding academy, or school for that matter.... no field trips, bible conferences, campmeetings, etc.... for all of those things provide opportunities for kids to hang out.....

That was exactly my point. We don't plan to send our kids to academy. As for the other activities, they will be supervised by us. I am quite serious about following through on this.

 

[StormyOne]

That was exactly my point. We don't plan to send our kids to academy. As for the other activities, they will be supervised by us. I am quite serious about following through on this.

That's fine however consider this.... parents attempt to instill in their kids values and the ability to make good decisions. Children are generally raised to be at some point be independent.... if they are never allowed to make decisions because of parental supervision, how will they learn to make those decisions?

 

[tall73]

They will be allowed to be independent. But they will always come home at night, and we will know where they are.

As opposed to being in a place where their every moment is planned, (at the academies I have seen, this is often the case), but the only ones who are around are one person or so on call. It is not as though the Academy has no strict rules. But they don't have a way to enforce them.

So you wind up with them being overly strict on paper, and often the students find they can get away with about anything in reality. This is because there are not enough people who take a personal interest in them, look out for each one individually, take time to talk over their day, etc.

In other words, they have a staff member, not a parent.

While the rule was that I was to not go to people's houses of the opposite sex, my mom did not have a tracking ankle band or something. But she still could tell when there was something up. She is my mom. So I did learn to be responsible, but I also found that you react differently to authority when it is someone you care about, rather than just a staff person. Also, there is less peer pressure when every night you are at home rather than just with your friends.

and while I guess you could say my mom and dad were at times strict, I didn't really feel so. In fact, going to an SDA college after living at home seemed strict. If I wanted to stay out late, I just called, told mom why, and she said ok. But not at college. Academy is even worse. Everything is a rule. But everything seems to be a cold hard rule with no reasons, no bending, and no person behind it, just the authority of the school. So kids resent the rules, and find ways around them.

And while I knew I was not to go to someone's house if they were a girl, in academy they lock the two dorms apart from each other, watch for hand holding etc., The kids joke, and have for decades, about getting pregnant by hand holding, because inevitably some teacher mentions that (yeah it just happened again for this generation at our academy). So that again, from the students perspective it is all a bunch of cold hard rules that are WAY out of touch with reality, rather than something you can sit down and talk about. While it was a rule for me not to go to someone's house, I could have easily gone to someone's house at any time. There were no locks. There were no people patrolling the halls. There were occassional inspection of windows to look for screens that were taken out. There was a respect for authority.

While Academies claim to keep out drinking, we know of kids who drink there even now, who use pornography, or use drugs. The point is, you can't keep things out just by rules and policing. There has to be respect. And Academies in many cases are not getting that respect. I could have gotten drugs, etc. in my neighborhood too. People at school used it openly. But I knew that was something I didn't want for myself, so I said no. And that was taught and reinforced by my dad's hatred for drugs. I knew his feelings, and had no reason to even go near them.

Now some academies, usually of the independent variety, have a process by which they only allow a certain number of kids, and the kids have to actually prove that they want to go, want to keep the rules, etc. They do manage to get respect. And I can see where people might send there kids there, but again, I would rather have them at home to keep an influence over them, and to help them through that time in life.

 

[StormyOne]

Might it be safe to say that you don't like the academy concept?

 

[tall73]

I like the academy concept, not the boarding academy concept. Yes, that is a safe assumption.

That is not to say that there are not some boarding academies that do much better at it than others. But I think that boarding academies were primarily made to address a problem that might no longer be there--distance. Now we can travel easier, and even skip travel totally through technology. Is there a reason to keep seperating kids from their parents, churches from their kids, etc. if we don' have to?

 

[HoneyDew]

bump