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The Future of Episcopal’s Residential Life Program with Dean Amila Williams

Dean of Residential Life Amila Williams has made schools her home for over 20 years. Her career before Episcopal spanned eight years in public schools, four years in human resources and training, and six years in private schools. As her family moved for these opportunities in Atlanta, Georgia, and New York, Williams discovered her passion for making schools feel like true homes through the boarding school experience. A chance encounter with the head of the upper school at Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School led her and her family to the mountains of rural Georgia, and the rest, as they say, is history.

At the time, Rabun Gap comprised 60% boarding students and 40% day students, and for the first time, Williams and her family got to experience life on dorm. Instantly it was a natural fit, with the Williamses hosting students for meals and casual hang-outs on Sundays. Williams made giving the students a taste of home by welcoming them into her family’s living room and kitchen with open arms a priority. That family tradition has continued seamlessly at Episcopal. Thaddius Williams, Amila’s husband, works as the manager of Episcopal’s Post Office, coaches the boys’ junior basketball team, and is a member of the Activities Team; their son Joshua graduated in 2022; and their daughters, Nia and Laila, have called Episcopal home since they were in third grade and kindergarten, respectively.

In her 5 years at Episcopal, Williams has been laser-focused on how to make the most out of the 100% boarding school experience for each and every student. “This is where everything happens,” the dean said of life on dorm. “This is where you live. This is where you play. This is where you study.” Students, she has come to realize, are their truest selves while on dorm, and the residential life team members have a unique and important responsibility to help each student feel at home at Episcopal.

In December of 2022, the two new dormitories opened to great fanfare on campus, advancing a major component in the 2018 Strategic Plan. The entire School community came together for a historic move-in day that had been long anticipated by students, faculty, and staff alike. It was a day that Williams has been preparing for since she took on her residential life role in 2020 and first heard of the administration’s long-term plans for campus dorms. On that cold but beautiful move-in day, upperclassmen helped each other relocate to their new rooms; dorm residents had a blast decorating the common rooms as a team; and the freshman class spent the day doing a variety of Service Council activities organized by Rev. Richmond Jones and supported by other faculty members.

Since move-in day, the new dorms already have greatly enhanced life on campus, thanks in large part to Williams and the residential life team. The addition of the new dorms will not increase Episcopal’s enrollment; rather, the buildings will enable the School to dedensify the other eight dorms and make the residential life program even more robust.

For the past eighteen months, Williams has been hard at work building a new residential life curriculum to prepare for the opening of these buildings. The new curriculum includes mandatory Monday night meetings on each dorm that last 15 to 30 minutes. The meetings are individually led by the ten dorm heads and designed to provide time for connection that may include hard yet necessary conversations about events happening on campus, lighthearted yet competitive games of Jeopardy, and good old-fashioned bonding over snacks. According to Williams, the main focus of the meetings is to build community and get students out of their individual rooms and into the common rooms for however brief a time. Rather than making it feel like another moment of an already packed schedule, Williams hopes students look forward to unplugging with their peers after study hall and relaxing together as a family.

Since the opening of the dorms, the students have been most impressed with the multiple common rooms and the kitchen. “The common rooms have been buzzing with dorm activities, bonding time, and the smell of baked goods from the kitchen,” wrote Charlotte Whiteley ’24 in an article titled “New Dorms, New Norms” that appeared in Volume 134, Issue 3 of The Chronicle. Whiteley also appreciates the partnership that comes with being the first group of students to move into a new space on campus and make their mark on the dorm culture. “Student leaders on both North and West are actively working with dorm faculty to develop connections and make the new dorms inclusive communities,” the prefect and rising senior wrote of the efforts.

A major component of the 2018 Strategic Plan was decreasing the faculty-to-staff ratio on dorm. Ensuring that our faculty and staff are available wherever and whenever learning opportunities present themselves has always been a vital component of Episcopal’s 24/7 learning environment, and it remains a crucial part of Williams’ vision for the program.

Dedensifying dorms means that each residential life member has more time to connect with students. “When you are in charge of 30 students instead of 60, you have more time to ask students about their days,” Williams explained. And in the event of a bad day, teachers have the opportunity to offer more support thanks to the smaller ratio. “You can ask the questions: Why wasn’t it a good day? What can I do? Do you want to talk about it? Can I connect you to somebody?” And that, to Williams and the students, makes a world of difference. “It gives us the time and space to really form our relationships,” she mused.

Like all Episcopal teachers, Williams wears many hats. In addition to her role as dean of residential life, she teaches Spanish, coaches track and field, and serves as the faculty advisor to Black Girl Magic. But her greatest pride is in her residential life work.

When asked about the biggest strength of Episcopal’s residential life program, Williams didn’t skip a beat. “Our dorm heads,” she said. “They’re really incredible. They know every child’s struggles. They lead an entire dorm team of 6-8 people. They navigate providing care, accountability, and fun for their residents, all while interacting with parents, and it can be really tough sometimes. To me, they’re the people who make this place feel most like a home.”

Williams spoke of the hard moments on dorm that residential life members are privy to — those moments when students get into arguments, miss out on an opportunity, feel their first heartbreak, or lose a family member. “They’re learning how to manage themselves and their environment,” she has observed about life on dorm. “They are able to decide who they want to be and how they want to be.”

A testament to the strength of the community, Episcopal relationships don’t end at graduation. Williams constantly hears from former students who simply want to share their joy, send updates on their lives, and maintain that strong connection that began on The Holy Hill. Over the years, Williams has noticed a trend in which students are more inclined to do that. They are always the ones she knew on dorm. “Those are the students who were at our house every Sunday,” she remembered of the relationships she was able to build thanks to sharing a common home. “And that’s the vision I have in my head for all Episcopal dorms. That’s what I want our common rooms to feel like for all students.”

With a little distance after graduation, those students are able to see just how much they grew in high school. “I always hear from our students that this is where they learned how to treat people, how to talk to people, and how to be a member of a community,” said Williams. And it has always been paramount for her to provide a safe environment for students to grow into themselves. “This is where they learned how to make mistakes, how to apologize, and how to talk to different people. As educators, we know how important it is that students are seen and known,” she said, and she strives every day to provide that for each student who calls campus home.

As the new dorms continue to make their mark on campus life, opportunities for renovating the other eight dormitories — Anderson, Berkeley, Dalrymple, Evans, Harrison, Hoxton, Hummel, and McGuire — will be evaluated. Depending on the extensiveness of the work, this process will happen over future summers or, in some cases, over school years. The long-term goal, as outlined in the 2018 Strategic Plan, is to provide similar living environments in all dorms and the completion of the two new dorms has paved the way for that assessment and planning to begin.

EACH SILVER LEED CERTIFIED DORM INCLUDES:

OVER 26,000 SQUARE FEET, excluding basements | 36 BEDS | 3 FACULTY RESIDENCES, creating a healthy student-to-faculty ratio of 12 TO 1 | COMMON ROOMS on both floors | MULTIPLE FLEX ROOMS designed for quiet study space | FULLY EQUIPPED KITCHEN for student use ———————