Alright, while I'm still considering doing script frenzy this year, mainly because of the fact that I'm gonna be wrapping up school at that point and really want to focus on that instead of doing SF this year. But if I do, I have a few questions.

The scrip that I'm gonna be working on is going to be set in a boarding school (cheesy, yes I know) and I want to know a few things.

1) Is life outside of class pretty much the same as any public school or is it really different?

2) Are the clicks the same or are they totally different.

3) Are there any curfews or in most cases limited internet access.

5) Are the teachers a little more laxed or are they harder?

6) Normally is there any kind of hazing or ritual that the upper class kids to the new kids or is that just a myth?

This all the questions I have right now, if I think of anymore, I'll post them here. Any help would be great. Thanks in advanced.

It's not too cheesy, actually, as long as you do it right. I'll give you some hints after I answer your direct questions. First, background: I went to boarding school in the middle of nowhere, which is generally how boarding schools are, and unlike at public school the middle and high schools used the same facilities. It was a run-down little place in the desert.

1) Life is waaay different. You can't just go over to the mall with your friends. Hanging out with your friends takes on a totally different aspect-- you have to find ways of entertaining yourself outside of shopping or going to the movies or whatever. Examples: go biking. Go exploring [behind the old gym, there's ghosts!]. Hang out in Commons, which has a few couches and a snack bar. Hang out in the dorm. Persuade an adult with a car to take you off-campus [on WEEKENDS-- they'd never do it during the week]. About cars, too, seniors only have that privilege, and only day-students [i.e. not-really-boarding students, who go home at night.]

2) They're generally the same, in my experience. There was a lot of diversity at my school as far as... well... everything, so that made it really cool, but at the same time the jerky jocks still bonded, the Asians, the rodeo girls, the volleyball girls, and so on. Naturally.

3) Curfews at my school were as follows:
Weekdays-- Middle school: 9:30. Underclassmen: 10:00. Juniors: 10:30. Seniors: 11. Weekends-- move all one hour forward.
Internet access was VERY limited. A few coveted cord spots (generally snatched up by the middle schoolers at like 6 in the morning... obnoxious) in Commons, and a computer lab generally only open during school hours or when someone with a key felt like opening it.

5) Generally harder, or at least they're supposed to be. That doesn't mean they're good. That doesn't mean they're bad, either. I got a mixture of good and bad, but for the most part they were all very hard on me. College prep boarding school is meant to be rigorous. Again, though, just like in any school, the teachers sometimes suck.

6) A myth... for the most part. In girls' camp, nothing like that went on. In boys' camp, a lot of that crap happened because it was a hierarchy and it was sort of survival of the fittest, and they didn't want the misbehaving inner-city kids or Germans to go back to where they came from, so it just go worse.

Now, more things that might be useful! Or maybe not. But I have a wealth of information to share.

a. Stringent visiting hours, if any. I once sprained my hip and my guy friend couldn't help me to my bed because that would be breaking "major bounds," aka stepping foot inside an area that could get him expelled. Other examples: walking off-campus after dark, being in the opposite sex's camp for any reason except walking to somewhere else except during camp visiting hours. There's a neutral area between camps where people can be.

b. Gossip is MAJOR MAJOR MAJOR at boarding school. There's not much else to talk about. I know that I hate gossip and I still got pretty good at it there. Rumors circulate like forest fires, over and over and over, much more intensely than at public school. [Because in general boarding schools are pretty small--200, 300 students.]

c. Class attendance is very mandatory. Something like four unexcused absences and you failed the class. However, they liked sports people and let them off for any number of reasons remotely related to sports. On the topic of sports, it takes quite a van ride to get to anywhere competitive from a remote boarding school.

d. The cafeteria food still sucks.

e. Dorms vary in layout, but generally are suites with bunk-beds; two boarding roommates plus one day roommate who might stay for whatever reason on a weekend or for mandatory events. Dorm Hierarchy: There are "prefects," who basically are supposed to be dorm student leaders but generally don't do much of anything. There's a dean of residential life for each camp, then an administrative dean over them. The "principal" equivalent is called, variously, "headmaster" or "head of school" (never headmistress for a woman).

f. Advisors are an important part of boarding school life. At my school, we had advisee groups that met once a week at our advisor's house to eat dinner, generally caf-provided but sometimes homemade, and my advisor was really good for actual advice. Not all advisors are, though.

g. School parties are really lame. People never show up and even when they do there's a zillion chaperones for every attendant making sure nothing interesting happens. The same goes for prom, which is generally really, really lame (depending on the class who puts it on).

h. Slang seems more prominent at boarding school, at least from my experience in boarding vs. public. We like to be cool. Examples: "What time is it?" "5" (when we mean 2:05), "caf," and so on.

i. To get mail, people have individual mailboxes in a large compartmentalized area assigned to them for the year and they have a certain combo to that box. They then just get their parents to send mail to the school address with their name at the top. Pretty simple.

Well... if you have any other specific questions, let me know. I hope this has been helpful.

Thanks Wild. I think that you answered all the other questions that I might of answered all the other questions that I couldn't think today. Now I can start writing the treatment this month.

No problem... I hope some of it's useful. If you'd like, I could look your script over when you're done for realism and such as far as the boarding school aspect goes.

I have a question about advising: How many people are in an advising group? (at my school, there are 10-12....but I don't go to boarding school. Just writing about one.) Are students of all grade levels in advising together? (tenth graders mixed in with the ninth graders, and so on.)

Thanks!!

My experience is a little different, because although I go to a boarding school, it's also an arts academy, so some things are really heavily impacted by that.

1) Is life outside of class pretty much the same as any public school or is it really different?
It really depends on the social circle you're in. Here, if your family lives in the area, you can be a day student—i.e., come to classes but live off campus—and so for people who are friends with day students, it's somewhat similar. You can get off campus to go places (although you have to be back by sign-in—more later) and whatnot. But for those of us bound to school property, it's pretty different. Either way, you find that sometimes people are too busy to hang out because they have too much classwork, but sometimes they're just really busy practicing/rehearsing/etc., which isn't at all uncommon here. Because it's an artsy school, there are a lot of performances/showings/readings, so those can sometimes be like going to the movies.

2) Are the clicks the same or are they totally different.
Well, we're artists, so of course we haven't got any jocks. (No, that's a lie; it's just that being a jock here doesn't have nearly the status power it tends to elsewhere.) Most of our groups are based on major—i.e., the writers tend to stick together, and the actors tend to stick together, and the violinists tend to stick together … Also, because of the way the school's structured, it's not at all uncommon for people to come for only part of their high school career—usually senior year (which is what I did)—so there's a group of the four-year seniors who've been here all along. Sometimes you get "public school" kids clumping together as well, cos although people are generally pretty good about not making any assumptions if you've come from a public school (as opposed to a different private school) there's definitely a stigma attached to the schools themselves. On the whole, I think things here are more driven by finding people you can relate to than by finding a way to set yourself out as part of a somehow higher social order.

3) Are there any curfews or in most cases limited internet access.
Every night, we have to sign in at the front desk in our dorm building. The school week here is odd—Tuesday through Saturday—and on school nights, we have to be signed in by ten; Saturday night is midnight, and Sunday night is eleven. Whenever sign-in is, we have to be in our own rooms an hour later, and an hour after that, the Internet shuts off and we're supposed to have our lights out. Also with the Internet—we go through a local proxy, and there's a program that flags what may be inappropriate activity for the dean to review. Sex, drugs, violence, and intolerance are the big no-no points.

5) Are the teachers a little more laxed or are they harder?
It depends in what sense. A lot of the academic teachers are a little more chill—they still hold us to high standards and teach well and all that, but because we're assumed to have some level of discipline, they're a little less inclined to hyper-manage our work. The arts instructors are harder than those you'd find in standard public schools (and probably other private schools) because that's the main reason we're here, after all. Some of them are very strict and demanding (more common in the music department) but some of them are pretty laid-back, more of the philosophy that you get out of this what you put it.

6) Normally is there any kind of hazing or ritual that the upper class kids to the new kids or is that just a myth?
Not that I've encountered. We hear about it, of course—there's a statue of some bears in front of our auditorium that supposedly new students in some group are told to kiss that veteran students have supposedly peed on, for example—and there may be rituals within certain departments, but I'm not really aware of anything.

A couple other things—this may be because we're rebellious, non-conforming teenagers who like to think of ourselves as artists, but sex and drugs are HUGE and all over the place. When I went to health services with a minor complaint, the first thing they offered to do was to give me a pregnancy test, because the default assumption is that we're all having wild sex all the time, which is often the case. People find creative places to do it because privacy is obviously more an issue here. That's another thing I've found—I took for granted having time alone, but at boarding school, you get practically none of that unless you walk out into the middle of the woods. Also, with health services, they are very hesitant to excuse you from class, but it's not very difficult at all to get them to prescribe you birth control, Xanax, or an antidepressant (Zoloft seems to be the favorite).

We also have obligatory community service—i.e., everybody has to do some sort of job for the school. All first year students spend a semester doing food service (plating meals, washing tables, etc.) but after that there's a lot of freedom—you can work in the library, the gym, the snack shop, whatever.

We don't have advising groups here, but we have sponsor groups, which sound like pretty much the same thing except maybe vaguer. Each student is assigned to a faculty member (you can make requests, but nothing's guaranteed) and for that year, that's your sponsor group. The faculty member can take the group off campus for dinner or a movie or something, or you can meet up on campus, and your sponsor group leader is also there to listen to your problems and all that supportive stuff (although really most teachers are very open to that, because artistically inclined teenagers tend to be pretty emotionally unstable sometimes, so breakdowns are kind of inevitable).

Oh, and your roommate can pretty much make or break your experience here, although if it's really not working, there's the option of moving out—either to a single or else in with another single.

Hopefully something in there was useful.

Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?

I went to a boarding school in south central Pennsylvania. I have little to add to what has currently been said, though I would like to note the location, both regionally - boarding schools in the north-east are different from those in the south-east, and geographically - boarding schools near a city allow for a more typical high school experience than those in the country (like mine was). Hope it helps. Message me if you'd like to hear more about my experience.

This article about boarding schools is very informative and good as it presents the inside features of these schools. Most of these schools are good, but there are some fake schools as well with no facilities, inexperienced staff which is very harmful for teens.

To be honest, a boarding school is not much different from a public school. The main difference is that you won't get as many "working class" pupils at a private school. But to all intents and purposes, they are pretty normal! I go to one and it's fine! http://www.langleyschool.co.uk It's not at all like how they're depicted in the "boarding school novels" where homosexuality and experimentation are rampant.