The Arrow Fall 2023

Introducing the Warrior Wellness Center

This year Oak Hill Academy created a physical space dedicated solely to our students’ wellness needs. We’re calling it the Warrior Wellness Center , and it’s right in the heart of our academic building. Why did we do this? Well, as a boarding school where life continues in community after the final class bell, the Academy has always attended to the holistic wellness of our students. You can see how seriously we focus on adolescent health by examining the lifestyle programming we provide. We begin by forming meaningful relationships with our students, which allows us to know them individually, and understand their backgrounds, strengths, needs, and dreams. We serve healthy, fresh food. We allow for plenty of sleep in our daily schedules. We enable appropriate social interaction. We offer wholesome outdoor after-school activities daily. We maintain reasonable limits on technology – particularly mobile phone use. All of these measures promote wellness. Beyond these daily emphases on wellness, we chose “Wellness” as our annual theme for the 2021-2022 school year. This meant that during that year, numerous special events and our entire year-long advisory curriculum were connected to the concept of wellness. With so much of our programming already being focused on adolescent wellness, it made perfect sense to create a space dedicated to it. We’ve defined the scope of wellness as having 5 primary domains: physical, social, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual. All of these elements intersect and interact with one another continuously, so a mainstay in the design of the Warrior Wellness Center is that it will contain design features that touch on each wellness domain. The space is welcoming and comfortable and will support a diverse range of wellness activities. We’ll have a coffee shop area for youth group meetings. We’ll teach yoga class on the big-screen TV. Peer tutoring and ping pong tournaments will coexist in the space. We’ll have bean bag chairs so you can sit and read and think. We’ll host movie nights, conduct first-aid training, and provide counseling space. We even intend to use the space for guest speakers on wellness-related topics.

Our students’ wellness is vitally important to us, and we’ve found that if a student is well, growth can occur. And that’s what we all want – a campus full of growing, thriving students. We invite you to come see it for yourself.