Questions to Ask Private Schools If Your Child Has A Learning Difficulty
You may have decided to place your child in a private school for any number of reasons. If your child has a learning disability (LD), or Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (AD/HD), your decision to apply to a private school might be a response to past frustration in trying to meet your child's learning needs in a public school system. Or, you may have decided on a particular private school because it promotes important values, or because it feels like a "good fit" for your child's personality or preferred ways of learning.
Whatever the reasons, you will likely discover that attending a private school is not a magic solution to your child's learning challenges. Like public schools, private schools differ widely in their understanding of, and attitudes toward, children with LD or AD/HD. They also vary a great deal in the degree to which staff is prepared to make classroom accommodations and modifications that support successful learning for students with LD or AD/HD.
Researching and applying for admission to private schools can be time consuming and expensive. You can save yourself time and stress if you organize the search process from the very beginning. We suggest three steps in the private school application process, which are described below. For each step, there is also a downloadable worksheet, designed to help you gather and organize your school information.
Step 1. Profile your child as a learner.
Like parents, private schools are usually seeking the best possible fit between child and school. Many private school applications or interviews call on parents to describe their child as a person and as a learner. So, a helpful first step in selecting a suitable private school for your child is to create a profile of his learning strengths and challenges, interests and activities, personality, and social style. If it seems useful while you're creating the profile, ask for observations about your child from family, friends, coaches, and teachers. Take a look at our Profile of My Child as a Learner worksheet for support in collecting and organizing this information.
Sample questions from the "profile" worksheet:
- What are my child's favorite and least favorite school subjects?
- Does my child learn better with highly structured assignments, or does he do better when assignments are more open-ended?
- What are my child's social skills and challenges?
Step 2. Decide which schools to apply to.
Before you fill out a long application form, collect all the required documentation, and pay the application fee, it can be useful to "pre-screen" a school to see if it meets your most important requirements. If your requirements include, for example, that a school be state accredited, you can get a yes or no answer pretty easily. On the other hand, if you are looking for a learning environment that addresses the needs of a child with learning or attention problems, the task of pre-screening a school can be more complicated.
One way to organize the school information you collect is to create a grid with your family's most important requirements across the top, and the prospective schools listed down the side. Or, use our Before You Apply worksheet. Cross out any questions on the worksheet that don't interest you, and add questions as necessary. To get a variety of perspectives on a school, read its brochures, visit its website, call the admissions officer, and talk to parents you or your friends know whose children attend the school.
Note: Especially at the pre-screening stage, you may be hesitant to directly ask a school how it addresses the needs of children with LD or AD/HD, for fear the school will automatically reject your child. When this is the case, you might want to start with a more general question, such as "To what extent does your school individualize instruction to the needs of each child?" The school's response to this broad question should give you a pretty good sense of whether and how to ask more specific questions.
Sample questions from the "before you apply" worksheet:
- How does the school describe its approach to education?
- How much time are children expected to spend on homework, and how does the school describe the purpose of homework?
- How often are standardized tests given, and what is their purpose?
- How are students evaluated?
- What is the school's approach to discipline, and what methods do they use to modify children's behavior?
