Sam Niu’ 15: The proposed grade-level advisory system will not be phased in this September, but will instead remain under consideration during the 2015-2016 academic year. Reverend James Squire, Upper School Chaplain who is in charge of the current advisory system, told Scholium, “The firm decision was to take everything under advisement for another year so there’ll be no changes for next year.” Despite this postponement, strong opinions have come up both among students and faculty concerning the future of advisory.
While the specifics of the proposal can be found in the e-Scholium article “Advisory Program Forum Summary: Potential Changes,” the general idea was to investigate the “feasibility” of a recommendation from a committee issued sometime between 2010 and 2012 which suggested “having a structure [for advisories] that allows student choice, but also a grade based format,” explained Dr. Delvin Dinkins, Head of Upper School.
An ad hoc committee of 20 faculty members was created to discuss the possibility of phasing such a system in one grade at a time. After four meetings, this committee decided with the faculty on May 6, 2015 that “The best thing to do before just jumping into that [new system] is to study it some more and craft something that’s a little more developed,” said Dinkins.
As read by Squire, the final recommendation of the ad hoc committee was in part to “continue to: study the feasibility of a grade level system during the 2015-2016 school year, conduct additional research of advisory programs, survey students, and like schools as well, decide the true purpose goals of the advisors,” along with a laundry list of other goals.
Challenges facing the proposed system include, according to Squire, “Choice, but choice within grade level, so that [students are] not having as many faculty to choose from… The other issue was that a lot of people thought it was good to have people of various grades in the same advisory and [in] the program that we initially proposed, we could mix grade levels by mixing advisories in homeroom…but choice and range of choice was a clear issue.”
Regarding this proposal, faculty and student opinions form a wide spectrum. Voicing one side of student opinion, Audrey Lee ’17 noted, “Advisory gives us a chance to connect with people from different grades, get advice, and still talk about issues within our grades… I feel that if we had grade-specific advisories, we would be even more separated than we already are.” Dr. Thomas Goebeler, a member of the Upper School Math Department, echoed support of this feeling, adding that the desired grade-level activities are actually possible in the current system and that the advisor’s ability to advise diminishes as the range of student choice narrows.
In contrast, Annabelle Wondrasch ’18 believes, “it would be beneficial to have upperclassmen in homeroom rather than in advisory. Advisory [should be] centered on the individual rather than the group, which allows the student to get needed personalized advice. The homeroom atmosphere [would] create a relaxed setting to ask general questions of the more experienced students.”
Nevertheless, student opposition is widespread, manifested most notably in the freshman petition letter written by Emma Sargent ’18, edited by Charlotte Weisman ’18 and the accompanying 96 signatures gathered by Sargent, Weisman, and Will Scheff ’18. In the letter, the following concern, among a number of others, was expressed to Dinkins, Squire and Dr. TJ Locke, Head of School: “We believe that the decision to change the structure of the current advisory structure is being undertaken for bureaucratic reasons that have little or nothing to do with the quality of our experience as students. While the current system may be too individualized, we think that its inherent messiness is a virtue, rather than a deficit.”A full copy of the letter may be found on the e-Scholium website.
Finally, responding to the unspoken belief that changes will proceed regardless of student consent, Dinkins said such rumors are “unfounded” and Squire noted that the belief that the proposal was “just a fait accompli coming down…was not the case.” Squire continued to say “What Dr. Dinkins and I were going for…was a consensus –this wasn’t going to be a majority vote” and that “This had to be the most transparent process that covered as many people as we could.” Hopefully, this level of transparency and desire for a consensus will continue as the proposal moves under consideration next year and towards a final decision.