Residential Life
Hillside's heart is in its boarding program, a core of stability and warmth that embraces the community as a whole, offering a wealth of opportunities for learning tolerance, responsibility and cooperation. Most faculty members and administrators live on campus, forming a neighborhood where adults, skilled in interacting with young boys, and in tune with their interests and concerns, are a nurturing and watchful presence at all times. Hillside's dedication to a family atmosphere is evident in the new student house where 15 boys live side-by-side with three faculty families housed in apartments.
House parents get their young charges up in the morning, making sure they are dressed properly and fulfill their responsibilities in the house. As in any good family environment, manners and hygiene receive particular attention. Boys are expected to keep their personal space and the common areas clean and tidy, learning to do chores because they need to be done, not because they have to do them. In the evening, house parents sometimes provide freshly baked cookies - a much anticipated treat.
Student proctors play a vital role in the houses, helping new boys through bouts of homesickness, and generally assisting the house parents in interacting with the students
Components of Residential Life
Dining
Hillside's meals are family style sit-down occasions in which students are assigned seats (in mixed age groups) with a faculty family. Hillside prides itself on teaching good manners at the dining table and on encouraging the boys to engage in meaningful conversation.
All of Hillside's meals take place in our 200-seat dining room, recently recognized as one of the finest dining rooms in the boarding school world.
Meals
Middle school age boys are a hungry bunch! Understanding this and having nutrition in the forefront of our food service philosophy, our Chef prepares a delicious variety of meals throughout the school year. We offer breakfast, lunch and dinner each day as well as a healthy snack in the morning. Fresh fruits are available at each meal and at snack times. Boys are allowed to keep snacks in their house food closet which is monitored by house parents.
Weeknight Study Hall
Each evening (Sunday through Thursday) following dinner the boys participate in evening study hall. This is a quiet time for students to use in completing their daily assignments. Boys are divided into small study rooms. A teacher monitors each room, and an administrator checks in on each room on a regular basis. One study area is the tutorial center which hosts the academic support study, designed to accommodate students who require extra attention. Of the five core classes, four meet each day on a rotating basis. Therefore, every student has four homework assignments per evening. Each homework assignment is designed to take 20-25 minutes to complete. The Library is open on certain evenings for students who require the use of technology, or need time to perform additional research for long-term projects and assignments.
House Life
Hillside is blessed with six housing units to which the boys are assigned based on age and grade. The houses are staffed by Hillside faculty members. The house parents are supervised by the Dean of Residential Life.
Roommates
The Dean of Residential Life oversees the placement of students into the houses in consultation with other senior administrators, school counselors, house parents and families. Generally, boys are divided into age/grade appropriate groups and then each group of two to four roommates is selected based on chemistry, boarding status, family/student needs and preferences.
Common Rooms/House Activities
Each of our houses has a common room that boys may gather in with their house-mates and house parents to play games, hold a community meeting each week or just relax and watch a little TV. Computer/video games are not allowed during the school week as we stress the importance of interacting with others in the community. House parents are ever aware of boys that may not find it easy to make friends or join a group activity and they coach and encourage them quietly.
House Chores
No community can flourish without the experience of shared responsibilities. The care and cleanliness of the house is therefore shared with a custodial staff that cleans and sanitizes the restrooms and showers while the boys are responsible for their own personal area which includes making their bed each morning, keeping their closet neat and orderly and completing a given chore each day that rotates on a weekly basis. These chores may include taking out the trash, picking up the common area and cleaning the house kitchen.
Weekends at Hillside
For our seven-day boarders, and any day students and/or five-day boarders who remain on campus on a given weekend, the weekends are a time of exciting activities, rest and good old-fashioned fun.
Hillside School is centrally located between Boston and Worcester, which affords us a great deal of variety in off campus cultural and fun activities. Regional sporting events, art and science museums, theater, state parks, shopping, movies and skating are some regular activities that are within a five to thirty minute drive. Additionally, some annual activities are a visit to the Big E (Eastern State Exposition), Georges Island in the Boston Harbor, the Museum of Science, the Museum of Fine Arts, a Paw Sox baseball game to name a few. Hillside School strives to balance the weekend schedule in such a way that our students can enjoy the many enrichment activities our location provides and still have sufficient time to unwind.
Religious services
Each weekend, our Chaplain coordinates either an on campus chapel service or works with the Dean of Residential Life to schedule visits to local area houses of worship for all boarding students. Our population is very diverse religiously and we attempt to meet the many spiritual needs of our community.
Staffing
Your son's teachers and coaches staff our residential program. We do not utilize any part-time residential personnel. We believe that a boy's connection with his house parents is a special one and should be nurtured throughout the day. Seeing your history teacher take a spill while sledding down a snow-covered hill or playing pick-up soccer with your French teacher on a lazy Sunday are just a couple of memorable events that make boarding school such a lasting experience. Hillside faculty connect with our boys on many levels and that is what separates our staff from a typical 8:00 am to 3:00 pm school experience.
