Lewis House and Lowndes House will no longer be sixth-form dorms next year. Graphic by Sesame Gaetsaloe/The Choate News
In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, the group of faculty members in charge of student housing is working to ensure that dorm life will be preserved next year, providing the same housing information to students and maintaining as much of the old housing lottery process for boarding students as possible.
“I think what’s really important with all of the uncertainty that’s been going on is to retain as much familiarity as we could in what was happening — so, to do what you expect and not all of a sudden change what’s going on,” said Mr. Will Morris, Director of Residential Life. He explained that this will help not only students but also faculty members better adjust to the difficulty of arranging housing assignments, which must now be done virtually.
The housing process started at the end of the winter term with Mr. Morris working closely with Ms. Judy Senft, Assistant to the Dean of Students, to determine the distribution of students across campus. Around April 10, the Admissions Office updated them on the number of students in each grade for the next academic year, allowing them time to set aside specific dorm rooms for new fourth, fifth and sixth formers. The form deans will then coordinate rooming requests and housing lotteries to make rooming assignments. The entire housing plan will be double-checked to ensure the numbers add up and no student is left out.
A few tweaks had to be made to the housing process this year. In the selection process itself, deans have been forced to use a random number generator for the lottery instead of having students actually pick a number out of a hat.
Mr. Morris said, “[A random number generator] has the same effect, but it used to be a great moment as a dean when the students would walk in and look at the basket of papers and think to themselves, ‘Okay, I must pick a good number right now.’ It was this moment when it almost felt like you as a student had some control over that random number.”
Students also did not get a chance to visit prospective dorms ahead of time to get a better feel for which dorms they could see themselves living in. Alternatively, deans and other faculty members have been working to share more information and give students a better picture of dorms through writing descriptions in lieu of physical visits. Irene Garcia Gutierrez ’22 said, “The process was stressful especially because it’s harder to communicate with people when you are not with them physically, so I figured things out on my own.”
The housing plan for the upcoming academic year has changed slightly. “Every year, we have to change usually just a small number of house designations. Interestingly enough, we don’t have the same number of students every year,” said Mr. Morris. “Luckily, this year we actually had to make relatively few tweaks.”
There will only be three changes to the housing plan this year: Atwater House will go back to being a sophomore/junior boys’ dorm after having been a sophomore/junior girls’ dorm this year, Lewis House will become a junior girls’ dorm instead of a senior girls’ dorm, and Lowndes House will no longer be a senior boys’ dorm but a junior girls’ dorm.
Mr. Morris stressed the importance of creating a new understanding and structure for residential life at Choate after students are able to return to campus. “What exactly the adjustments will be, whether in the classroom, or in dorm life, or in any place throughout campus, it’s still too early to say. No matter what, we’ll be prioritizing student safety and wellbeing in any adjustments to our program that need to be made in order to ensure that we can keep everybody healthy and keep everybody safe. That’s hopefully the first priority,” he explained.
“As our running the lottery would suggest, one of the contingencies that we’re most hoping for is a return to campus in the fall,” Mr. Morris said. “That’s what we all miss and that’s all we all want, and we feel like if we can all be back together, even though we have to be six feet apart, that’s still going to be preferable.”
