Woodside Priory keeps boarding school tradition

Sam Whiting:

At the end of the school day, as their classmates pile into cars for the commute home, 50 students at the Woodside Priory, near Stanford University, turn and lug their backpacks uphill. These 30 high school boys and 20 girls are already home. They call themselves the "dormers," and they are the last of their kind between San Francisco and Monterey.

"I have roommates instead of a mom. It's better, I think," says sophomore Allegra Thomas, 14, as she sits in a vinyl booth in the mock '50s-style diner in her residence hall. It is 5 p.m., which is right about when she would be getting home to the Santa Cruz Mountains, with her mother shuttling.

"Before being in the dorms, I never really had an opportunity to hang out with people after school because it was such a long drive home," says Thomas, who started the Priory as a freshman day student, then became a boarder midyear. "Because I'm on foot, I can do more things around the school, be part of the community. I like the structure. My grades have been better."

Posted by Jim Zellmer at August 4, 2009 1:42 AM
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