User blog:Hermione Chase/Up-Close and Exclusive with Bullworth Academy

So as part of my Psychology of Schools Tour, today, I visited Bullworth Academy. Unlike any of the other boarding schools I’ve went to during my tour, this is definitely one of the strangest of the group.

That being said, it’s still a pretty prosperous school. Located in the greater New London, Connecticut area, it is among the most expensive schools to attend to in all of America, its cost being $9,000 per year. Now while that’s pretty crappy, most of the kids have had free rides to some of the best universities in America, such as Boston University, NYU and even Cornell. Bullworth Academy is also considered one of the most elite and best schools to attend--academically, that is. The actual students would strangely have to disagree.

When I first arrived, the first thing I noticed was how small the campus is. The majority classes are in the main building, one of the only two “class buildings” -- the other of which isn't three quarters as big -- of the eight total buildings. The other buildings include the library, the “clubs” building, the two gym buildings and the girls and boys dorm.

What I found really interesting were the girls and boys’ dorm, in which there was only one of each, housing just 32 students per both. That gives a sum of 64 students in the entire school and an average of 16 kids for each grade. When I learned this, I had so many questions: Are the students close or do they hate each other? What about their clubs, their sports team, are those enough? Most importantly, how boring are the graduation ceremonies?

Truthfully, what I was specifically intent on learning were the answers to the first two questions. According to one student, Davis, a sophomore, it’s half-and-half.

“No one has a lot of friends. It’s kind of impossible when there’s only, like, 15 of us,” he then added, “It’s kind of a good thing or bad thing depending on who you are. You either bond with people from all grades because there are barely any of us or you don’t like anyone because there are barely any of us.”

So what do the students who ‘don’t like anyone’ do for fun?

Senior Angie, who is among those who doesn’t like anyone, responded, “I usually hang out with my friends from other schools off-campus, in Old Bullworth Vale or Bullworth Town. But that can’t happen until two weeks into November.”

Which brought me to another question: so what do you do for fun for those first two months? It may seem like a silly inquiry, but most boarding schools allow its students to go out on the weekends and some even on weekdays at the very beginning of the school year—it’s how the school allows you to enjoy your free time. There are common rooms, but from what I saw in the boys’ dorm, they don’t offer much, consisting of only two tables, an arcade machine, a couch and a frickin’ antenna TV. So if Bullworth Academy doesn’t allow you to leave until November and it’s not like the common room does anything, what do you do until then?

The answer: after school activities.

This is where I discovered that Bullworth Academy is in fact a pretty genius school. You see, all students are required to participate in at least one club and two sports. While the school offers a vast range of clubs (45 to be exact; no wonder there’s a separate building for clubs), the only sports accessible is football, cheerleading, swimming, basketball and gymnastics. Given that all 64 students are obligated to choose two of the five (the former three taking place in fall; the latter two in winter), the teams easily fill up. This is a clever plus for the academy.