Dear Upper School Students and Families,
It is a pleasure to officially welcome you to the 2024–25 school year. I hope that your summer offered meaningful opportunities for rest, relaxation, and fun and that you share our excitement to get started with another school year of learning, connection, and growth. We have been working hard to prepare for the boys’ return and look forward to the classrooms, halls, and fields coming to life once again in the next few weeks.
After a summer of restoration and reflection, I know that our dedicated faculty members are eager to reconnect with the boys. They have spent the last few months reading up on the latest developments in their fields, fine tuning courses to optimize student learning and engagement, and attending a variety of professional development workshops. Countless members of the Upper School team have been working hard over the last several weeks to build the infrastructure for the upcoming year that will best position the boys to hit the ground running in September.
We once again enter this year with a steadfast commitment to our primary objective – to make sure that each boy has a transformative school experience so that he leaves us with a set of lifelong relationships and with a new understanding of who he is and what he is capable of. An important part of this work is making sure that community expectations and norms of engagement are clear so that the boys are best positioned to align their behavior with program expectations and core institutional values. We will continue to encourage the boys to “opt in'' and participate in the various extracurricular opportunities that exist in our program – clubs, interscholastic sports, productions, school publications, musical ensembles and other student organizations – as this engagement complements the important work that is done in our classrooms and allows our boys to cultivate meaningful relationships. In the hallways, on the stage, and on the fields our goal is to encourage the boys to be fully present with one another and amplify behaviors that make all community members feel valued and connected. In the classrooms we remain dedicated to promoting practices that best position each boy to meet established learning goals through a combination of self-discipline, focus, individual effort, collaboration and support.
Perhaps the most consequential programmatic change for the coming school year is a new cell phone/mobile device policy that we firmly believe will allow us to accomplish our core goals to optimize broad community engagement, foster meaningful social interactions, attend to student health & well-being, and create the conditions that best support student learning. Upon returning in September students will not be permitted to use or access their cell phone during school hours.
After extensive research on establishing a phone-free school day in which we reviewed both external resources and internal data points, we concluded that this approach will cultivate a school culture that will allow our boys to be present with one another, to learn well, experience personal growth, and nurture meaningful peer relationships. MIT professor Sherry Turkle wrote in 2015 about life with smartphones that, “because of our phones, we are forever elsewhere.” We are confident that adopting a policy that supports a phone-free school day will allow our boys to be right where we want them to be: fully present and engaged in pursuit of their academic, extracurricular, and social-emotional growth.
There is clearly an opportunity cost when students have unfiltered access to a device offering robust virtual activities intentionally designed to capture and sustain their attention. Jonathan Haidt, psychologist, author and thought leader on phone-free environments, poses the following question in his book The Anxious Generation: “Naturally, Smartphones and their apps are such powerful attention magnets that half of all teens say they are online ‘almost constantly.’ Can anyone doubt that a school full of students using or thinking about their phones almost all of the time – texting each other, scrolling through social media, and playing mobile games during class and lunchtime – is going to be a school with less learning . . . and a weaker sense of community and belonging?” We know that our boys yearn for connection, community, and authentic engagement and have concluded that boundaries on phones during the school day will loosen the grip of the virtual world, thereby creating opportunities for better learning and relationships in the real world.
We explored several options to execute a phone-free school day. Our broad objective was to establish a set of clear, simple, and direct procedures that could be cohesively operationalized and consistently enforced. Given that our policy states that students may not access their cell phone during the school day (8:30 a.m.–3:15 p.m.), we wanted to adopt practices that make it clear that any student using their phone during the school day is in violation of the established policy.
As such we have partnered with Yondr, an industry leader in helping schools create phone-free educational environments. Yondr has been implemented in over 2,000 schools across 16 countries to facilitate an engaged learning environment. We believe that phones do have some utility. We have also found that learning and social behavior improve drastically when students are fully engaged with their teachers and classmates.
The Yondr Program utilizes a simple, secure pouch that stores a phone. At the beginning of the year each student will be issued a Yondr lockable pouch. Every student will secure their phone in their personally assigned Yondr pouch prior to the start of the school day at 8:30 a.m. (9:00 a.m. on Wednesday). Students will maintain possession of their phone and will not use them until their pouches are opened at the end of the school day (3:15 p.m). Students are required to bring their Yondr pouch to and from school each day and are responsible for their pouch at all times.
The boys will be issued their Yondr pouch on the first day of school and we will take time to review the specific practices and procedures that will allow for the consistent enforcement of this policy. Additional information on the cell phone/mobile device policy may be found HERE. This resource includes daily procedures, a FAQ sheet, and several reference resources that informed our decision to move to a phone-free school day. I appreciate your anticipated support of this new policy as we work to partner in service of the boys’ ongoing well-being, growth, and development.
Please read below for several back to school reminders and updates that merit special attention. You may also click HERE for a centralized location on our website that contains Upper School specific back to school information and resources. I appreciate you taking the time to read this note given the amount of information included. Please feel free to reach out with any questions.
Finally, thank you for your continued partnership as we work together on behalf of the boys to create a community of respect, connection, and support. I feel fortunate to work each and every day with all of the people - faculty, staff, families and students - who bring to life the School’s mission to develop young men of integrity, intellect, and compassion. Enjoy these last few days of summer and see you in September!
Take care,
Mark Fifer
Head of Upper School
