On Friday, May 19, the student body was left in a state of surprise as an email from the Dean of Students, Will Miller, revealed a new lunch clean-up policy: there will be no assigned advisor group to clean, so students must clean up their individual places. This change raised questions and sparked many emotions among the students. 

Previously, the responsibility of cleaning up the Dining Hall Commons (DHC) during lunch fell upon a designated advisory group for an entire week. These advisory groups had tasks such as clearing tables, sweeping floors, collecting trash bins, and disposing of waste; however, the recent policy change announced by Miller created a shift in the cleanup dynamics.

The new procedure of clean up from Miller’s email consists of the following rules:

1. Return eating trays and eating utensils to the designated cleaning station

2. Properly dispose of any and all trash that is at, by, and under the individual tables that you are occupying

3. Wipe down the individual table-top surface of the table that you are occupying (wipes will be available)

4. Sweep under and around the individual table that you are occupying and collect, then, properly dispose of the trash in one of the waste baskets/trash cans (you know where the brooms are located).

This unexpected adjustment left many students puzzled, including Isaac Linden ’25 who expressed his confusion and shared, “I feel like we’ve had a good process this year. I don’t understand the sudden change when we have three weeks left in the school year.”

Miller provided an explanation stating that due to insufficient advisory groups available for rotation before the end of the school year, he saw an opportunity to transform the culture surrounding the cleaning process in the dining hall. Additionally, he clarified the motive behind implementing this new policy, stating: “The main reason is mostly because all of the advisory groups have finished rotating for lunch duty each week. I thought it would be unfair for an advisory group to have an extra week of lunch duty, so we came up with this new solution. If this new dynamic works well for the last couple weeks, I’m hoping that maybe next year we will get to use this instead of the usual advisory groups rotating.”

Additionally, Aarav Shah ’25 had some concerns regarding this new policy: “I don’t know why we can’t get [maintenance staff] to clean up after us in the dining hall. I feel like the students shouldn’t be required to do all this cleaning only after eating lunch.”

Upper School Director of Quaker Studies, Dan Zemaitis, explained: “The Quaker reasoning behind why we have the students of each advisory clean, is so that we maintain the Quaker spices of Community, Equality, and Stewardship. The idea of taking care of the space we use is so that we do it as a community, and we want to distribute this responsibility equally. With stewardship, we are making sure we’re maintaining spaces we use as a community and keep them in order as best as we can.”

While hoping that this new policy aims to keep uniform, Teacher Jackie Scully commented, “I think this will be a great experiment. I think the idea Mr. Miller is offering is so that everyone is responsible for their own space, and I think that it could be a hit or miss. I hope that this new policy would benefit the dining hall for a cleaner environment, and I think it’s more manageable than assigning an advisory for a week.”