Outdoor Seating for All

Middlesex’s Next Renovation Should Reflect the Community

Picture this: it is a nice sunny day, and the only thing you want to do is to enjoy the warmth before the brisk winter hits. But when you walk outside with your plate full of food, you see all ten of the lawn chairs in use, leaving nowhere to sit for you. Oh well, you think, time to go back into the dining hall. Middlesex has lots of space for people looking to eat lunch in the dining hall, but not all students enjoy eating indoors. One thing that is missing is outdoor seating on the Circle. Especially in the fall and spring seasons, the weather outside is perfect for a lunch picnic with your classmates. Currently, we have multiple lawn chairs out in the circle, but they fill up fast. The addition of picnic tables in the grass right in front of the Ware Hall would be perfect on a nice, sunny day.

The Circle is the most scenic place on campus, but doesn’t have very many places to sit. Adding picnic tables would benefit students and staff exponentially given the relatively low cost. Picnic tables can be cheap and cost around an average of $200. This would be a reachable goal for a fundraiser if the school needed extra funds for the tables. If the school purchased 10, it would provide outdoor seating for 80 students, a good portion of the school. This would also make the dining hall feel less cramped and let students sit with all of their friends or new people without having to worry about taking someone else’s seat.

In an article titled “Spending Just 20 Minutes in a Park Makes You Happier” by Jamie Ducharme, she writes, “the medical community is increasingly viewing green space as a place for their patients to reap physical and mental health benefits.” This shows the importance of being outdoors for mental health, something Middlesex students could use with their jam-packed schedule and heavy academic workload. With hours of homework being assigned to them every night, the stress can pile up fast. Spending lunch indoors is simply a waste of opportunity to improve mental health.

A primary concern would be that this would interfere with the space on the Circle for school events like graduation or field day. This would not be the case because of the ease of moving in outdoor tables; they simply fold up and can be stored in a relatively small space. Another potential problem would be taking up space on the Circle in general, which is generally meant for playing games like spikeball or frisbee. However, picnic tables would only take up a very small fraction of the space. The area we would need for lunch would be about five thousand square feet, which is miniscule compared to the 124 Thousand square feet of the Circle.

The athletic fieldhouse’s completion should come with a nice break from construction on campus. Starting another big project wouldn’t be the right thing for the school right now, as construction is loud, noisy, and doesn’t make for a very good learning environment. We should instead focus on making small, quick improvements to student life on campus, starting with the picnic tables. Additions like these are what makes the everyday difference in students’ lives.

Jackson Winn ‘29 & Nick Noon ‘29