In an email outlining policy updates sent to students at the end of August, Dean of Students Stacy Tepp introduced a surprising new policy: the official designation of common spaces for each grade.

Prior to the announcement, juniors and seniors unofficially designated spaces for themselves: lower Schilling for seniors and the smaller upper Schilling for juniors. The new policy allots the English commons for freshmen, the language commons for sophomores, and makes the self-selected spaces for juniors and seniors official.

“The intent was to provide space for people to be together,” Tepp said. “What we had heard from ninth and tenth graders is that they didn’t have a space to hang out.”

Sophomore Yasmin Khan said that she also felt largely ambivalent regarding the previous norm, where students had an unspoken agreement about which spaces the upperclassmen had used.

“I think I just kind of accepted that to be the hierarchy. It was a bit weird the first few days to get to know everything. But I just kind of did my own thing,” she said.

Senior Harper Glass is skeptical.

“I feel like common spaces – assigning them to one group of people – kind of takes away from the definition of it being a common space.” Glass said.

The expansion of the upper school footprint brought with it a need to reclaim some peer-to-peer connection and grade level unity.

Administrators aimed to tackle the common space request in addition to another school issue: snack distribution. Tepp described the previous process, where snack bins were brought to advisory space, as inefficient. This year, the snacks are stored in wagons in each grade’s common space.

“I think we knew even mid-year last year that the snack [system] was not sustainable. There was a lot of hassle. So I think from the faculty perspective, this is easier. We wanted to put this back on students. You shouldn’t need adults telling you, here’s yours, here’s when you can eat it,” Tepp said.

Khan likes the new setup, but doesn’t find that it changed her behavior on the whole. “Personally, I do like having the snack in one space…but I haven’t been using my common space that much,” Khan said. “I mostly go to study rooms for tutorial and stuff, because mine [the tenth grade space] is the language commons, and there’s not really much there to sit down on, but I know people who do sit there.”

An unofficial common space was markedly absent from the grade level lists: Redleaf Commons.

Formerly a place where students, primarily ninth and tenth graders, would congregate to socialize and study, the school aims to keep it as a formal entrance to the school. Facilities removed the couches there to encourage gathering in grade level common spaces instead of Redleaf during school hours.

Glass feels like the common spaces limits across grade level interactions and the spaces available for students to use.

“I think that taking that away is annoying because I use that space, too. And now it’s like, ‘Am I gonna get in trouble for trying to study there?’ It was a common space for years and years,” Glass said.

Glass wouldn’t mind the stricter rules of Redleaf if the common spaces were exclusively reserved for students. “Some teachers have been complaining that we’re loud because they use tables [in Lower Schilling] for meetings. But this is our common space that you gave us to be social in, and then me and a big group of people were threatened to be kicked out of the common space because there was a tutoring meeting at one of those tables when [the teacher] could have done it in an empty classroom or office.”

Before the upper school renovation in 2018, designated common spaces on the smaller school footprint caused disruption to classes with noise and some disciplinary consequences for behavior.

The new common spaces will remain distributed by grade until the end of the year.