https://www.ncadvertiser.com/opinion/columns/article/The-paradox-of-In-Loco-Parentis-14041437.php
The paradox of In Loco Parentis
Published 1:13 pm EDT, Friday, May 19, 2017
In New Canaan, spring is a time for many things: Easter egg hunts, Little League, the May Fair, bittersweet reunions with nine irons. It is also a time when many parents are trying to decide which New England boarding school to send their teenagers to next fall. This year, that selection process is a more emotionally and morally fraught decision than in years past.
Like you, I was appalled by the recent revelations of a decades-long history of sexual predation and institutional cover-ups at Choate Rosemary Hall. I attended Choate from the fall of 2003 through the spring of 2006. None of the reported crimes occurred while I was on campus, but three of the men named in the report — Chip Lowery, Bill Cobbett and Chuck Timlin — served as teachers and advisers for many of my friends and classmates.
Much of the blame for these crimes has been laid on the ubiquitous boarding school policy of in loco parentis ("in place of parents"). For a long time — surely up through my boarding school career — in loco parentis was seen by many parents as one of the unassailably positive aspects of prep schools, an institutional policy that states, quite literally: Trust us with your children, and we will nurture them as you would. In the wake of the Choate scandal, in loco parentis now seems like a grave institutional defect that provided the kind of private, unsupervised interactions sexual predators thrive on.
Faculty has hardly any role
In my experience, however, in loco parentis failed to live up to its own lofty standard not just through the inappropriate intimacy it afforded the likes of Lowery, Cobbett and Timlin, but also, paradoxically, through a distinct absence of supervision or adult interaction. While the unfortunate, nameless (save for one brave woman) victims were subject to far too much adult attention, for most other boarding school students the reality is that outside of the classroom or playing field the faculty has hardly any defined role in their daily lives.
My advisers for all three of my years at Choate were perfectly nice guys, but I rarely interacted with them beyond my nightly fist bump to confirm I was indeed in the dorm. At Choate, you can travel anywhere within the Wallingford town limits without notifying an adult. Once you have escaped freshman year and its more ardently surveilled dormitory, I discovered, you can come and go more or less as you please, as long as you make your nightly check-in (or at least have a semi-plausible excuse for why you didn't).
As a student, I didn't consider this lack of supervision a bad thing; like all teenagers, I wanted my privacy and my independence. I'm merely trying to illustrate that if this most recent scandal is what upset your view of prep school as a warm, safe place for your kid to get a great education, you need to get down to Spectacles for an update.
Prep school is, I can attest, using my one year at NCHS for comparison, a place to get a superior education. It is not, however, any more adept at quelling adolescent mischief than public high school: there's drinking, there's drugs, there's sex.
Parents, on the other hand, were largely absent from Choate while I attended. Except for occasional appearances on the sideline at sports games, most parents, even the ones who lived nearby, had enough faith in in loco parentis that they rarely visited the campus. For most of my classmates, a few phone calls or emails was the most contact they had with their parents while school was in session.
One of the unique characteristics of boarding school is the resident student community it fosters. Like college, it seems like a widespread peer group that too much parental involvement would upset. But boarding school is not college, and the students there are not adults.
For parents deciding where to send their kids to school next fall, the most important questions are: Is my child going to be safer here or there? At home or away? At this school or that school?
I don't know the answers to these questions. The depressing truth that every parent learns is your child will never be completely safe, anywhere. As horrifying as the Choate reports are, I don't know for sure if teacher/student sexual assault is any more common in boarding schools than public schools.
What I do know is there is no such thing as in loco parentis. At whatever physical distance from their teenagers, parents are required.
Creighton Stevenson, 27, was born and raised in New Canaan. After three years at Choate he electively left and went to New Canaan High School for his senior year, '06-'07. He is currently a student at Columbia University.