Why Some New Yorkers Are Fuming About Prince George’s School Choice
By Josh Duboff. Photos: Getty Images.
Last week, the royal family zigged where the British press expected it to zag as the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge announced that Prince George would be attending Thomas’s Battersea when he begins school this fall instead of Wetherby. You see, Thomas’s Battersea (which really sounds like the name of a The Decemberists song more than anything else) is about a 30-minute drive from Kensington Palace, whereas Wetherby is close to the palace and also where Prince William and Prince Harry were enrolled when they were George’s age. Wetherby—and the parents of children who were set to attend that school—were, it’s safe to say, blindsided by the decision.
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And little did we realize at the time that the effects of the decision were going to be felt across the pond, too. Per a Richard Johnson Page Six report, “some Upper East Side parents are feeling burned” by Kate and William’s choice in George’s schooling. The reason? New York's Wetherby-Pembridge School, a satellite of Wetherby, is opening this fall, in “a Beaux Arts mansion off Central Park,” and, Johnson reports, “it was widely assumed,” when New York parents applied for their toddlers to enter the school, “that some royalty would be rubbing off on them from across the pond.”
It makes sense. Imagine how chic it would sound to be able to drawl at a dinner party, “Oh, yes, Antigone attends [in a whisper] Wetherby-Pembridge—you may have heard it—it’s the same school Prince George attends in London.”
“Huh? The . . . same school?”
“Oh, yeah, it’s the New York outpost. So, you know, George and Antigone are basically classmates [prolonged laugher]. I guess you could say I’m . . . basically Kate Middleton!”
“Right, basically.”
This story originally appeared on Vanity Fair.
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