Hoosac School

Hoosac school was founded in 1889[1] by Dr. Edward Dudley Tibbits. Facilities are located on the Tibbits Estate, which rests on 350 acres (1.4 km²) near the Vermont border.[2] The school hosts the yearly Boar's Head & Yule Log Festival, which was an American first.[3] This production has since been copied many times after Dr. Tibbits published a book containing the basics for the festival. One of the most prominent members of the Hoosac School was Father Sill,[4] who left the Hoosac School in 1906 to found the Kent School,[5] which he based on Hoosac.

The student body has an average of 190 students a year. They occupy British style "forms" two thru six, roughly equivalent to grades 8 through 12, as well as postgraduate grade levels.[6]

The school has a one-to-seven faculty to student ratio, with nearly every teacher performing double duty as a teacher and another function (sports coach, nurse, admissions officer, etc.) Class size varies, but ranges from three to 14 students. All dorms contain separated faculty apartments, allowing the teachers to function as dorm parents to the adjoining dorm.

The school has half-day Wednesday and Saturday classes, which allow the school to operate using trimesters instead of semesters. A number of advanced-placement courses are available.[7] Students from non-English speaking countries have the option to take ESL courses.[8]

The student body is governed by a series of prefects who are elected by the administration and the previous prefects.

Hoosac School has a 100% college acceptance rate among graduating seniors.[9]

Most of the population is boarding students. Day students make up a very small but growing percentage of the overall enrollment. Normally, the male to female ratio is 2:1. Hoosac continues to draw a diverse student population, with students currently from 31 countries and 10 U.S. states. Students attend from throughout North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. ESL classes are offered in all subjects as a result. Although the school itself is Episcopal, the student body contains pupils of many diverse faiths, as well as atheists.

The students are divided into two houses, the Antonians and the Graftonians, whose house colors are red and purple respectively. Students are sorted at random by pulling colored balls from an opaque container, although legacy students may forgo this in order to choose the house that their family has traditionally been a part of if they so choose. In order to ensure the houses remain even in population, the number of balls is exactly equal to the number of students to be sorted, and when a student selects legacy, a ball of the coordinating color is manually extracted to account for this. New faculty are likewise sorted, and if their children attend the school those children may legacy select their parent's house if they desire. There is a friendly rivalry between houses in most things including academics, inter-mural sports, and even which house is better at singing the school ode, in Latin.

Classes run six days a week, Monday-Saturday. The dress code is semi-formal; males must wear suits or sport jackets; neckties are required with dress shirt. Females must wear appropriate garments which include dresses, dress shirts with skirts or slacks, or other formal wear, and as of the 2016-2017 school year, a cardigan or blazer. Dresses are required for Friday night's formal dinner for young women, and young men must wear full suits. During class time on Wednesday and Saturday the students may dress in business casual, and are not required to wear ties or jackets/sweaters, but are still not permitted to wear jeans or sneakers. When not in class or at a formal meal in the dining hall, students are permitted to wear what they please, within reasonable limits.

Optional breakfast is served on every school day including Saturdays, after which students are required to go to a chapel service in the morning before classes.[10] Classes are 50 minutes long, with 15 minutes passing time between them with schedules varying by day of the week. Period breaks are allowed, depending on the students' schedules, giving occasional downtime to those students who are able to schedule one. In the middle of the school day, or the end of the day if it is Wednesday or Saturday, lunch is served in a formal community style with assigned seating, each teacher heading up a separate table, and eating with their students. Every two weeks the seating chart is re-done so that students eventually eat with nearly all of one another, as well as the teachers. The head table seats the Headmaster, and any students or faculty he has invited to sit with him for that meal.

After classes end on full-class days, students have a period of time to return to their dorms and change before they are required to attend practice for their sports, which are not optional, unless they have been placed on a medical restriction due to injury or illness. On half days they may take this time to visit teachers at their home or office if they are in need of extra help, or they can use this time to study or relax.

Dinner is served at 6pm. On full school days, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, dinner is also semi-formal, with assigned seating, and the students use part of their intervening free time to wash and change after sports back into their school wear, with the exception of Friday night dinner at which their school wear is insufficient, as it is full formal. Although teachers are present at the assigned tables on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, they are individually only required to be there on one of those nights, allowing them to eat at home or out on other nights. However, all teachers and all day students (who are otherwise free to depart after sports) must be present for Friday's formal dinner. On Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday, dinner is casual buffet style with free choice of seating as these meals occur during student free time. They are still not optional for boarders, however; a faculty member is always present for them to check in with at the door on their way in, and failure to do so may result in consequences.

On school nights (all nights other than Saturday) boarders are expected back at their dorms for "study hall" from 7pm to 9pm, during which time the teacher they live with is available to them to assist with homework and enforce a general requirement of order and low volume, so that everyone can work. Students may study at a different dorm to their own, or in the library with the permission of their dorm parent (and in the case of another dorm, the other dorm parent). Day students who are present at this time must either depart or go to the library or day student lounge to study, lest their presence out of doors disrupt those who are not allowed out. Students on Honor Roll are allowed to depart study hall at 8pm, which is time they frequently use to go to the school sports center. On some Fridays the beginning of study hall may be delayed, or the entirety of study hall may be replaced by an after dinner assembly with a special guest lecturer, which all students and faculty are expected to attend.

After study hall the students are free to go back out to the sports center, other dorms or the "Squeelary" (the campus rec room below the dining hall). During good weather they also congregate on the lawns, or make use of the firepits. Curfew is at 9:45pm on school nights, and at 10:30pm on Saturday nights. Lights out is at 11pm on school nights and midnight on Saturday nights. Off-campus trips by school bus are available to students Saturdays between dinner and curfew, and Sunday throughout the day. Common destinations include Bennington, Vermont, to which there are several trips in a given weekend for different purposes (to see a movie as a group, to shop at Wal*Mart, to bowl, etc.) and Crossgates Mall trips which last several hours, allowing students to see a movie, shop, or eat at the restaurants within. On Sundays breakfast and lunch are replaces with a casual style brunch, which is optional. Although chapel is not held on Sundays, students wishing to attend church are able to join bus trips for that purpose. Transport of individual boarders to off campus amenities like haircuts, dentists, or the bank tend to be arranged one-to-one between the student and their dorm parent.

Students have "work jobs" which rotate weekly; these include doing dishes and fixing meals in the dining hall, and cleaning certain common areas. All students who share the same faculty advisor also share the same work job assignment, and that advisor will ensure that they have turned up to do what was assigned to them. These jobs take place at different times depending on what they are, for example if one is on dish duty, he will have work job immediately after dinner, but if he has mail room, he will need to be present between sports and dinner, when other students are free to retrieve their mail.

Students who skip their classes, shirk their work jobs, are late for curfew, are disruptive in class, cheat, or commit other infractions face a disciplinary committee headed by the dean of students. The majority of the offenses result in a student receiving, in order of severity, detention served during what would be their evening free time, being "Campused" (i.e. grounded to campus), or placed on "Category", where they are both campused and required to do labor jobs assigned by maintenance and housekeeping. More severe infractions can result in being suspended, which for a boarder means being sent home to their parents for the duration of their suspension.

Breaks are usually long, to allow foreign students a chance to return home. A Christmas break of three to six weeks is normal.[11][12] There are smaller breaks at the midpoint of each semester, referred to as "long weekends" which last for four days, during which many students may remain on campus if their home is too far to reasonably travel to in this time. During this time, meals are served in the brunch/buffet dinner manner of Sundays, but there are no bus trips.

The large number of buildings on campus are of mixed use; most of them (dorms not included) house classrooms. Tibbits Hall[13] has the widest use, containing a dormitory, classrooms, and the administrative offices. Wood Hall is a close second, split into a dorm, and the school library and computer lab, with classrooms above, but as there is no internal connection between the academic section and the dorm, it could be considered two buildings, and thus Tibbits retains its title. The school has an astronomy dome in the science building which is permanently decommissioned, but new one has recently been built behind the Sports Complex. The most recent addition is the wood shop, which was built in the winter of 2009.[14]

Every meal on campus takes place in the dining hall. Awards are also given out in the dining hall during the school year, including National Honor Society awards. The dais of the dining hall is also used as the stage for the Yule Log Festival. There are two classrooms in the same building as the dining hall, as well as the school store. Below the dining hall is the "Squeelery," a rec room with table tennis, Foosball, and a small shop selling snacks. Sports facilities include a large multipurpose grassy field area, tennis courts, and the Harry Dickie Sports Complex gymnasium with a full-sized basketball court, fitness center, weight room and indoor swimming pool. A brand new hardwood basketball court was installed in September 2018. Near the school's entrance is a large pond which has been used in the past for kayaking and canoeing in warmer weather, and is still used for impromptu recreational hockey and ice skating in winter. Currently, a fundraiser to build a proper ice rink is in place.

Hoosac School has a live-in truant enforcer and live-in maintenance man in addition to the teachers living in each dorm, and a commuting daytime maintenance man. There is also a full custodial team who clean public areas of the school as well as dorm bathrooms; however, they do not clean student bedrooms. A school nurse with a full dispensary is available during school hours, as well as an on-call night nurse in the form of a live-in teacher who is also an RN. Sick students are provided meals by the dining hall in bags which are delivered to them by one of their dorm-mates, usually the Prefect. They utilize visiting chaplains for chapel including both Episcopal and Catholic priests. Students utilize a laundry service which picks up their garments for cleaning on Tuesdays and returns them Fridays.

Several dormitories are scattered across the campus. A total of nine dorms ranging in size from four to 40 students are in use for either boys or girls; no mixed-gender dorms exist. Although the school utilizes a competitive "house" system, none of the dorms correlates to either of the two houses, and students of both houses live (and attend class) commingled.

The dormitories on campus are:

For boys: Pitt-Mason Hall, Lewisohn House, Lavino House, Dudley Cottage, Canon House, and Whitcomb Hall

For girls: McCullough House, Tibbits Hall, and Wood Hall.

The largest is the Pitt-Mason dorm for boys, holding the majority of the male student body. The remaining dorms are more fluid, changing genders based on the demographic of students in a given class and which teachers are currently living in the faculty apartments within each. The gender of the students and their house parent are always matched.

The handful of students who already reside on campus in their parent's faculty housing may continue to live in their parent's faculty apartment, or if rooms are available after admissions close, may choose to move into dorms with their peers. Even is they remain in their parent's home outside those walls they are considered to be beholden to the same rules and schedules as boarders, and can be campused or put on conditions, unlike day students.

Towne Hall, a new dormitory for girls, will be completed in 2019 due to a boom in female enrollment.

Every student on campus is required to participate in a sports activity in the afternoons, every trimester.

Men's ice hockey at Hoosac School is the flagship sport for which the school actively recruits. This hockey program won the 2007 New England Prep School Division 2 championship.[15] They also won back-to-back Holt Conference championships during the 2015-16 academic year and 2016-17 academic year. In deference to the steadily increasing female student population, a women's hockey team was formed at the start of the 2016-2017 season. At the end of the women's inaugural season, four of five seniors went on to play college hockey. At the end of the school's second season in 2017-2018, all seven seniors matriculated to college hockey programs.

Men's and women's basketball currently are athletic programs which have also enjoyed recent success. The men's basketball team, composed mostly of underclassmen, won the NEPSAC 2011-12 Class D Championship.[16] They now have AAA basketball at Hoosac, the highest level of competition in prep school.

Other sports offered include soccer, lacrosse, basketball, golf, volleyball, skiing, cross country, and flag football. During the winter trimester only, the school also has skiing, which involves daily trips to Jiminy Peak. A private ski slope with a tow rope[17] is open to the student body on the weekends regardless of if skiing is their sport. Lifeguard training is also available as a secondary course.

The two school houses participate in annual Olympic style games to decide which house has bragging rights for the given year.[18] Each team is coached by a group of randomly chosen staff members of the same house.

Notable universities that Hoosac alumni have attended include:[6][19]

• Ivan G. Burnell, motivational speaker and author
• Kyle Hardy, professional hockey player, Ligue Magnus [20]
• Charles R. Howell, congressman
• Kevin McGuire, actor [21]
• Burgess Meredith, actor
• Thomas Pelly, congressman
• Horace Seely-Brown Jr., congressman

Cofer Black was the class of 2005 commencement speaker.

• "Hoosac School". hoosac.com. Archived from the original on 2015-05-06. Retrieved 2015-05-13.
• "Hoosac: History". hoosac.com. Retrieved 2015-05-13.
• "Hoosac School Profile | Hoosick, New York (NY)". boardingschoolreview.com. Retrieved 2015-05-13.
• "I Spy My Hometown - Hoosick Falls, NY - Tibbits' Mansion - Cheney Library". Archived from the original on 2003-06-15. Retrieved 2017-01-19.
• "You seem to be using an unsupported browser". maps.google.com. Retrieved 2015-05-13.
• "Hoosac School". nelsap.org. Retrieved 2015-05-13.
• "Private Colleges - Learn all about private colleges and universities at Petersons.com". petersons.com. Retrieved 2015-05-13.
• Peterson's Guides Staff (2004). Peterson's Private Secondary Schools 2005. Thomson/Peterson's. p. 894. ISBN 9780768913644. Retrieved 2015-05-13.
• The Association of Boarding Schools profile