Editor
Outside, the walkways bustle with activity as students walk from class to class, past the neatly manicured lawns and into impeccable classroom buildings and dormitories. Why, then, would one ever walk down a flight of stairs, through a hallway with snaking pipes looming overhead, and into a dingy basement room? Why, if one is a day student, of course! In the basement of Hill House and Library, and Steele Hall, reside the Day Student Lounges, or “DSL”s: the dilapidated, often overlooked homes-away-from-home of nearly two hundred Choate students.
While there are certainly many reasons to love being a day student, it is clear that we stand alone in our quest to improve the lounges and the day student experience. The administration has done little to lessen the numerous issues plaguing day students, the Lounges in particular.
The Lounges are hopelessly unequipped. There are few to no surfaces suitable for homework, and never enough seats to sit on. The environment is so drab that some students have brought in their own artwork in order to make up for the lack of decoration. The walls of the lounges are literally crumbling around us, yet they remain unattended to save the holes that have been patched up by the students themselves. Why should we have to replace the broken ceiling tiles with our own handcrafted cardboard ones?
Day students are forced to register their cars with the school, and even then they are forced to park at the SAC—truly a hike from the lockers allotted to day students—when there always appears to be numerous empty spaces behind the Dining Hall. Should a day student receive a Sunday Detention, he is forced to inconvenience his parents with driving him to school on a weekend morning rather than serve the detention during the school week. And should a day student be caught breaking any of the over-strict cell-phone policies, he is awarded a Saturday night detention, a punishment usually reserved for offenses by all measures more serious. The admissions office bombards prospective students with letters and pamphlets, yet the school would rather leave important documents for students to disintegrate in out-of-the-way student mailboxes than send copies of important documents to day students’ e-mail accounts or home mailing addresses.
There also ought to be a more lenient policy regarding first period tardiness for day students, whose late arrivals are usually the result of traffic on the roads. And why can’t more meetings for day students take place during the class day, when they are on campus, rather than at night?
We have certainly tried to improve the situation on our own. We hold weekly meetings and talk about day student concerns, yet there is never an administration member present. We bring in decorations for the walls, but why should we spend our own money when dorm common rooms are outfitted with paintings and artwork provided by the school? Day students purchased additional Ethernet cables so that more people could access the internet with their laptops—a task that should have been completed on Choate’s budget, not the students’. We even began to make our own table for the room, but is that really our job?
It is clear that day student issues are often an afterthought in the administration’s mind, even though we represent a full quarter of the student body of our school. We face many hardships that boarding students do not face, and all we ask is that our voices be heard. We certainly deserve better than relegation to the basement, next to a bathroom. It is time for the administration to take the plight of the day student more seriously.
