School portraits / School spirit and the schedule · 2025
The boar still needs a seat
Choate can supply the school spirit. Somebody has to supply the bus.
By the time Choate students reached Deerfield Day in November 2025, there were boar onesies, trumpets and a great deal of blue and gold. This was the annual sporting encounter with Deerfield Academy. The fans had six school buses to get them there.
A useful thing about school spirit is that it can be limitless. A less useful thing about a bus is that it cannot.
Choate’s student newspaper asked the activities director about the arrangements. She was trying to have enough seats without sending half-empty buses. Fans signed up through REACH, the school’s system for keeping track of them; each bus needed a chaperone.
Imagine being the parent of the child in the costume. It is lovely that they have found their people. It is also lovely that an adult intends to count those people before driving away.
This is an underappreciated part of having an exuberant teenager. The enthusiasm arrives magnificently equipped. The plan for getting home may be less developed.
Another student, Ha Jin Sung, had a less festive bus story. In a November 2025 opinion piece, Sung recalled coming back from an away tennis match the previous spring, rushing to orchestra and arriving half an hour late.
There is only one of your child. This is worth remembering when admiring all the things they can be. The musician and the tennis player may be the same person, and the person is still on the road.
Sung wanted to keep doing both. The argument was for better coordination, with an acknowledgment that scheduling had already improved. This was not a request to be relieved of an interest. It was a request to reach it.
You can imagine the awkwardness of arriving late for something you actually wanted to attend. You have not been idling. You have been taking another commitment seriously. This explanation is entirely reasonable and does not recover the half hour.
For a family considering a busy school, it is a useful question to bring along: can these two things fit into the same afternoon? Not on a list. In the life of the child who has to travel between them.
For Deerfield Day, the work included arranging the seats, the sign-ups and the adults. The spectacle depended on all three.
The teenager gets to throw themselves into it. Somebody else has made sure there is somewhere for them to sit.