GDS students pride themselves on their love of learning, even when the work isn’t easy. Especially when the work isn’t easy. When the workload involves locking oneself away for countless free periods, community times and lunches, we embrace the challenge.
The GDS library often helps students achieve their ambitious academic goals. It’s a space the GDS website says “serves as a central gathering, working, reading, book-borrowing, and studying space for the 9th through 12th grade community.” Notably, the website neglects to mention that the library also serves as a meeting space for GDS events, even when it means that students’ quiet studying space will be compromised (which I wouldn’t want to advertise on my website either). GDS students deserve a quiet space that is always available to them.
The GDS schedule provides many opportunities during the day to get work done: Students can use free periods, community times and lunches to study. A majority of the time, the quiet side is open, and students can use the space however they please. But a space that is not reliably available to students is one they can’t depend on. It’s that small minority of the time where it’s randomly unavailable that’s frustrating. Why should students’ access to the quiet side be dependent on the school’s need for it as a meeting space? It’s not as if our workload is modified to adhere to the availability of the quiet side.
This October, GDS decided to host head of school candidates in the quiet side during school hours. On four different days, the quiet side was closed off to students for most of the morning to accommodate the meeting, which history teacher Kim Nguyen, an attendee of the meetings, said included roughly 20 people.
“Anytime I go in there and the tables are in a U, that’s how I know that those people could have fit anywhere else,” senior Fiona McDermott said. While some spaces are surely more convenient than others, many spaces are capable of fitting 20 people.
“If I wasn’t on that panel, and I saw they were using [the quiet side] for the HOS search, and I needed to use the quiet side, yeah, I would be frustrated that it wasn’t available,” Nguyen said.
We’ve all walked in on a meeting taking place in the quiet side: it could have been an Impact Lab meeting, Student Affinity Leadership Council meeting, parent event, college visit or speaker, among many other possibilities. I often find myself questioning why those meetings have to take place in the quiet side, when doing so prevents students from being able to study.
High school office manager David Sarpal, who manages meeting spaces, voiced a concern with regard to alternate locations: “We don’t have many large meeting spaces,” Sarpal said.
Chief of Staff Lauren Dickert also recognized the school’s spacial shortcomings with regard to the head of school meetings: “We had 20 different faculty members who represented lower school, middle school and high school, and we don’t have meeting spaces large enough for that.”
The head of school meetings should have met elsewhere. We have a brand-new, expensive campus sitting right across the street. Per Dickert, two of each candidate’s four on-campus meetings took place in the lower/middle school multi-purpose room.
Even in the high school, many viable spaces exist. The Black Box and turf room are larger than any classroom and the quiet side. Sarpal noted the difficulties associated with meeting in the Black Box, among other spaces, such as the fact that changed configurations due to theater productions or other performances can impact availability or capacity of the space.
But the difficulty associated with meeting in the quiet side, which is the fact that students can’t use it for studying, never seems to stop meetings from being scheduled there.
Librarian Rhona Campbell pointed towards what she called a “lack of space issue” as a reason for why many meetings take place in the quiet side. And the issue isn’t going anywhere any time soon. But it’s also important to call into question the best uses of the space that we have. “When the library was remade about 12 years ago, it was remade purposefully with the idea that a library does not need to be a quiet space,” Campbell said. “Since then, there’s been a groundswell of recognition that some students do need quiet spaces to do their work and to concentrate.”
Picture this: You’ve got two tests tomorrow and a lab report due the day after. The large side is too loud for you, especially when you need to make every minute of the day count. But the quiet side is closed to accommodate a meeting. Where do you go? If you’re lucky, you might find a desk or table to yourself, secluded near the bookshelves. But often, those scarce spaces have already been snatched up.
The GDS mission statement claims that the school is “dedicated to providing a supportive educational atmosphere.” But I’m often questioning the verity of that assertion. When I find myself in the sort of scenario described above, where my learning resources have been stripped from me, I can’t help but think that GDS is depriving me of a “supportive educational environment.” At least, that’s how I read those situations.
So to the faculty members who schedule those meetings: I urge you to think about the students. Not the ones who may be attending your meeting (if any), but the ones whose academic progress relies on your picking an alternate location. Even if another meeting space is a little more inconvenient.