With the sudden influx of new male students, the traditional dorm assignments (boys in Field, Middle Dorm South, Borsdorff, and Hoerle Hall North, and girls in North, Case, and Hoerle Hall South) just wouldn’t do. So for the Kent 2017-2018 year, boys are being housed in North, MDS, and Borsdorff, while the girls live in Case, Field, and all of Hoerle Hall.

When asked about the smaller incoming population of girls and the sudden change in dorm housing, Ms. Mazza, Dean of Students and the 5th form class, said, “What we are experiencing, and what all the boarding schools are experiencing, [is] a smaller pool of girls who are interested in going to boarding schools, so there’s more competition for those girls We’re trying to compete for with other schools who offer singles and better accommodations, and trying to sell North Dorm to freshmen and sophomores was hard.” To that end, Kent has also been upgrading all the common rooms over the past several years, the most recent of which was Case common room, with new furniture and a new layout to make it more comfortable for students relaxing, doing homework, or just unwinding with friends.

When gender-flipping a dorm, there are several changes that need to be made for it to become a suitable. As Ms. Mazza explains the bathrooms come first and foremost: “Yes, bathrooms are adjusted according to the gender.” And on dorm aesthetics, she explains, “They painted in North and Mrs. Varga-Wells went to town in Field and Case did her usual decorating stuff. The dorm heads have their own sort of flavor.”

Through the years, Kent has changed dorm arrangements many times. Ms. Mazza closed by saying, “Historically for Kent School, if you’ve been here longer than four years, things have changed all sorts of times. When we opened up in ‘92 with boys and girls together, Field was a girls dorm and it was for 7 or 8 years with Ms. Lynch was the dorm head…so there’s a history and sort of a necessity every couple years to sort of change things.” With those wise words, members of the Kent School community can rest easy amidst these turbulent times. We’ve been here before, Kent is no stranger to sweeping changes, and, in a few years, we just might have yet another dorm arrangement.