PEA Enforces Attendance at Assembly

With a flurry of clipboards, shouting and hip to hip seating, the Academy rolled out its new assembly seating system on Tuesday, April 23. The policy, created in response to low assembly turnout, assigns students by class and last name to sit in specified sections of the Assembly Hall, where faculty members take attendance. Despite logistical challenges on the first day of implementation, the Assembly Committee plans to continue to take attendance.

In the weeks before implementation, Assembly Committee Chair and English Instructor Alex Myers and incoming Dean of Students Brooks Moriarty sent emails to the student body with seating assignments with two faculty members for each section. Faculty members will switch off between Tuesdays and Fridays to take attendance for their designated students at the beginning of the period. After checking in, students are allowed to sit anywhere in the vicinity. Late students will be asked to check-in with a dean since the front doors would close once assembly started.

As a result of the new attendance program, the Merrill Speaking Prize assembly began approximately six minutes later than the scheduled time of 9:50 a.m. Furthermore, the assembly ended at 10:36 a.m., in contrast to the traditional dismissal time of around 10:20.

The late start was partially caused by logistical issues and the resultant confusion. Lower Iliana Rios recalled that the attendance check method was inefficient and chaotic. “There were a lot of people standing around the teachers, and some of them didn’t show up,” she said. “It took them a long time to get everyone’s names, and everyone was lost as to where they were supposed to go.”

Myers also noted that there were a few mistakes in the printed attendance check sheets, such as the inclusion of students away at the Washington Intern Program or duplicate lists. Besides correcting such mistakes, Myers explained that the committee would wait a few weeks before implementing any other changes to the process. “I think we won't know that accurately until we do it four or five times. People [will] just get used to it,” Myers said. “That's the point at which we can say, okay, let’s put more people in this section. We can mess with things.”

Myers said that the committee expected that assembly would start and end later on the first few trials, but that the process would accelerate through the weeks. “If we get seated within five to eight minutes of the time we’re supposed to on the first time through, every time after that, it’ll just go faster,” he said. “We just knew it wasn’t going to be perfect, but we figured that’s acceptable.”

The philosophy behind the new system was to create a space for a unified school-wide experience, Myers said. “We want students up on stage doing incredible things, faculty on stage doing incredible things. We want our leadership out there and our alumni saying, this is who we are, this is what we do. And we want everybody there saying, that's amazing, or I completely disagree or I can't wait to talk about this [in the] afternoon,” he said. “If not everyone’s there, I don't get that feeling.”

English Instructor William Holcomb, while acknowledging the technical issues, expounded on Myers’ hopes of community engagement. “There’s a dynamic and synergy to the school when everybody’s there that’s not there when you’re missing 200 students,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s the best system, but it’s never going to be easy. There are some logistical issues, but there’s something to be said about having the entire student body together.”

Lower Charlie Preston, who performed in the Merrill Speaking Prize, was in support of the policy. “I think it was the best thing to do,” he said. “A lot of interesting ideas go into assembly. It’s kind of shameful when students don’t show up and we have giant blocks of the hall with blank seats.”

Other community members, however, were opposed to this implementation of mandatory attendance at assembly.

Prep Josephine Elting felt that the assigned seating conflicts with the Academy’s approach to students. “I feel like at Exeter, we get so much freedom with who we want to be and how we want to spend our time,” she said. “All of a sudden forcing us to sit in assigned seats in assembly is kind of taking that away from us, and also, forcing the teachers, who have stuff to do, to police us is unfair to them too.”

Faculty have traditionally organized meetings during assembly blocks; therefore, some have raised concerns about how duty assignments will disturb said meetings. When asked about the effects of the reformed assembly seating on faculty, Moriarty assured that “faculty are assigned to attend one assembly per week, so in theory this will not impact teacher schedules. The reality is that the importance of assembly as a community event is undercut by assigning faculty to attend one but not both assemblies.”

Prep Aletheia Zou questioned whether assigned seating would resolve low attendance. “That's not really solving the problem, which is that people are not interested in assembly because they're not seeing the speakers that they want to see, because when there are popular speakers or seniors who [are] well known or who talk about important parts of identity, a lot of people come,” she said.

Similarly, lower Bizzie Lynch cited the inconsistency in the quality of the speakers as a cause for dwindling assembly turnout and suggested that the school reduce the frequency of assemblies in exchange for more expensive but interesting speakers. “Focus on getting better quality speakers than a greater number of speakers,” Lynch said. “We would also have a greater assembly budget to get better speakers.”

Preston believed that mandatory assembly attendance would be rewarding as long as the committee made sure to hire a variety of speakers. “I still don’t like that we don’t have enough conservative speakers,” he said. “As long as the Academy is responsible and maintains a diverse range of speakers, I think this can be a good change for the student body.”

Overall, Myers hoped that the new assembly policy would encourage students to engage with the assembly program in other ways. “What I really hope is that, with everyone going, students and faculty can say, okay, I have to go. So because I have to go, I'm going to care about this program. And because I care about this program, I'm going to think about how can I be involved in it,” Myers said. “Because, if people don't like it, if people think assembly is totally a waste of time, tell me that, and let's make it better.”