Dive Brief:
- As schools around the country determine the best ways to accommodate transgender students, Phillips Academy Andover and Phillips Exeter Academy, two of the nation’s oldest boarding schools, will institute their first all-gender dorms this fall, according to NPR.
- School administration report they are receiving positive feedback about the new dorms from students and alumni, with Exeter English Teacher Alex Meyers saying 90% of students are supportive of the action.
- Staff at both schools were initially concerned that they might be making the traditional dormitories less diverse by specifying an all-gender dorm, but Meyers said they felt that the dorm’s existence and the school’s curriculum would allow the school to speak about the issue.
Dive Insight:
Housing and dormitory issues at schools and college campuses are an integral part of the ongoing conversation on how to accommodate the needs of transgender students. One aspect of the conversation playing out, particular on the higher ed level, is how to handle admittance of transgender students not just to dormitories, but to single-sex institutions. In 2015, Barnard College began admitting transgender students, the last of the “Seven Sisters” universities to do so. Last year, Spelman College also announced it was considering allowing transgender students admittance to the college.
There has been less media attention paid to these conversations and debates on the K-12 level for single-sex schools, but it is a conversation that is unlikely to abate soon. Federal policy and attention stands to shift under the new presidential administration, which in early actions has indicated that it will not necessarily pursue as vigorous a defense of transgender rights as the previous one. This inaction may make individual schools like Exeter and Andover the hotbeds of discussion and debate, as opposed to Washington, DC.