Reply to I'd love to be a fly on the wall during admissions decision meetings

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[quote=Anonymous]Parent here, but former educator that sat on admissions committees at several of the DC independent schools frequently mentioned on these forums within the last decade or so (I won't give more info for fear of giving away my superhero secret identity!).  As a parent, I sympathize with being nervous about people in a room discussing my child without me there to defend him/her like a mother bear!  But, remember that people who are in education are there because they like and understand kids.  The discussions were not mean-spirited in tone, and at both institutions I was impressed with the care taken by my colleagues to thoroughly read the files and to make these decisions in a way that is sensitive to the feelings of the parents and kids involved.  The content of the discussions was different at each institution, more I think because one focused on 9th grade admissions and the other on elementary age admissions.  For the 9th grade admissions, the opening discussion was always academic -- could the child do the work?  Within that threshhold discussion, it ranged from being excited about a potential academic superstar (teachers get excited about that) to making judgments as to whether the child by working hard and with support could have a positive academic experience.  For "special talents," unless the child was national level in something like dance or music (which occasionally happens), the biggest focus was athletics.  A very good athlete will have an edge at many schools if all other things are equal, and a superstar athlete may have that edge even if all things are not equal.  Like it or not, parents and alums in this town do seem to care about athletics and schools get criticized if they lose regularly in high profile sports UNLESS the schools have made it clear that they are not going to play the sports "game."  Elementary admissions -- which is I think where most of the interest on this board is (saying that as a fairly new parent myself who reads this board!) -- was trickier.  While the committees wanted to make academics the first focus, they know from experience that it is so much harder to project academic performance for a Kindergartener than for an 8th grader applying to 9th grade.  So yes, more attention is paid to play dates and interactions with the other kids -- did they seem eager to learn?  Articulate? Excited about any kinds of ideas, whether books they've read, things about science, etc.?  And yes, the child's behavior matters -- hitting or bullying other kids, for example, will come up.  Procedurally, my experience at both places is that every folder was discussed, but that clear-cut "yes" or "no" decisions got less time.  The middle pile got a lot of time.  Mostly the schools focused more on individuals with less of a worry about creating a Frankensteinianly perfect "class," but there is no question diversity (ethnic and racial and to some extent geographic, e.g. interesting international family) is a plus during the process.  Not that many comments about parents--generally it only came up if the prior school had tipped someone off that the parents were very difficult, or if someone was spectacularly awful (and think Michael Scott on the TV show "The office" level of awful) during the interview.  Even there, it wasn't a disqualifier -- if we wanted the kid we'd admit them and hope to educate the parents (or hope they had an off day based on anxiety).  Numbers of meetings?  Lots and lots during the big decision times, and lots of individual late nights of people reading folders and making their comments.  Sometimes some pretty civil but impassioned arguments on the committee whether or not to admit someone, but generally it was not a counting heads/voting situation as an attempt to come to consensus on each child (which happened most of the time).[/quote]

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