Safety and Support

High school students, no matter how smart or accomplished they are, need reliable and consistent adult guidance. There are approximately 600 adults on the Andover campus. Many of them will see your child on a near-daily basis, providing academic guidance and support and helping your child balance studying, athletics, extracurriculars, socializing, and fun.

Your child’s core support team will be in frequent communication with one another about your student’s academic progress and physical/emotional wellness. Most importantly, your child’s primary adult contact—the house counselor for boarding students and the advisor for day students—will be in touch with you at regularly scheduled times.

A large and important foundation of support for your child is the Andover student body. These young people aren’t just smart. They’re nice. All students—including dorm prefects and proctors, dormmates, teammates, club members, and classmates—look out for one another, providing study support, tutoring, and friendship.

Staying Connected, Getting Involved

Keeping families in the loop is an Academy priority. If your child is accepted to Andover, you will learn more about:

The Hive: an online portal and information exchange
Parent Bulletin and Andover eNews: biweekly enewsletters
Parent Directory: a helpful listing of fellow parents & guardians
Family Weekend: an October gathering on campus
Parents of Students of Phillips Academy (PSPA): a volunteer organization that helps families from around the world connect with the Academy and their students

House Counselors

Focused on day-to-day issues related to a boarding student’s well-being, house counselors live in the dorms, where they create a warm, home-like environment, maintain safe conditions and a good study climate, a make sure the rules are followed.

Advisors

Every student has an advisor who offers guidance on a variety of topics, including course selection, and helps students manage homework and activities. Students and advisors meet weekly, as well as at individually scheduled times, to talk about challenges and successes.

Instructors

Students interact with five or six different teachers each term. During regular 30-minute conference periods, students are encouraged to visit teachers in the classroom to review coursework, ask questions, or just talk about how things are going.

Coaches

Student-athletes often develop close friendships with their coaches. The same genuinely caring relationship can form with faculty members who advise a student’s favorite club, help them in the library, lead their musical ensemble, direct a dance or theatre performance, and so on.

Peers

Prefects, proctors, day student mentors, cluster presidents, and other selected student leaders support and mentor their peers. Proctors, for example, are like older siblings. They help make dorm life fun and act as liaisons between house counselors and students.

Academic Skills Center Team

Learning specialists from the ASC meet with individual students as needed and host workshops throughout the year to teach time management, organizational, and study skills.

A Commitment to Student Well-Being

Guided by our shared community values and the expectation of respect for self and others, we strive to foster a supportive and healthy learning environment that nurtures each student’s personal growth and intellectual development.

Learn More

Sykes Wellness Center

The Rebecca M. Sykes Wellness Center is open 24/7. Students can drop in anytime for medical care, guidance, or information.

Campus Safety

Friendly faces seen all across campus, the Academy’s Campus Safety officers patrol 24/7. They can be reached quickly at 978-749-4444 and are always ready to assist.

Conduct Response System

In Fall 2022, Andover revised its conduct response system to incorporate restorative principles and practices. Our students' health and well-being are paramount, and we know that a major component of their growth includes learning from mistakes. Our efforts center around meeting student and community needs, and we have begun using individualized Growth and Accountability Plans as a key resource to help students become more self-aware, access resources, hold themselves accountable, and learn from their experiences.

By making these changes, we are responding to evidence demonstrating that high-stakes consequences, such as suspension and dismissal, often do not effectively change behavior or promote growth when used as stand-alone responses. We, therefore, are limiting their use in favor of more rigorous behavioral interventions and restorative practices. Further, we no longer use disciplinary labels such as censure, warning, and probation.

Suspensions and dismissals should remain rare, but there will be situations when, following thoughtful deliberation, separation from Andover (temporary or permanent) is determined to be the best path forward.

We are at the beginning of a shift to a system that will evolve as we learn from ongoing experience, training, and research. As a policy, we will not consider requests to alter past disciplinary decisions retroactively.

Only a small percentage of Andover students interacts with our conduct response system. We believe in the promise of every student and do all we can to support them. The primary goals of our conduct response system remain the safety and education of our students.