At Harley School, Seniors Spend a Year Sitting With the Dying

The Harley School hospice program is not a simulation, not a field trip, but a year spent inside the lives of people who are dying.

A Year-Long Elective, Not a Field Trip

A Year-Long Elective, Not a Field Trip

The program runs the full senior year. Students attend daily classroom sessions and complete a minimum of 8 hours per month of hands-on fieldwork at local comfort care homes — all of it earning full academic credit. This is not service-learning stapled to another class. It is its own course, with its own rigor.

Roughly 60-70% of Harley seniors elect it each year, a share that grew from an original enrollment of 9 students when the program launched more than 20 years ago. The growth was not driven by institutional mandate. Students told other students.

What Happens Inside a Comfort Care Home

What Happens Inside a Comfort Care Home

Students work alongside patients, not near them. Each year, they provide direct assistance to approximately 50 people across two private comfort care homes — companionship, meal preparation, feeding, bedside presence.

The students are shaped by the patients as much as they shape the room.

The Classroom Running Alongside the Bedside

The Classroom Running Alongside the Bedside

Before students work with real patients, they train on mannequins. Classroom sessions address different forms of loss. Field trips go to cemeteries, crematoriums, and funeral homes, places most adults only enter when they have no choice.

The year ends with a Remembrance Day ceremony held a few weeks before graduation. Seniors share what the year actually did to them — not what they learned in the abstract, but what shifted. The timing is deliberate: it sits between the work and the diploma.

What the Harley School Hospice Program Leaves Behind

What the Harley School Hospice Program Leaves Behind

Sybil Prince hears from graduates years after they've left. The pattern is consistent: when a parent or grandparent was dying, they knew what to do because of this class. Some went into medicine, nursing, funeral home administration, and postmortem services — fields that depend on exactly the capacity this course builds.

Nationally, 86% of teachers say bereavement education is necessary, but 90% report lacking the training to provide it. On average, two children in every classroom are actively grieving someone close to them. Harley has been running this program for more than two decades. Seniors who choose it start in September and close the year with the Remembrance Day ceremony in spring, a few weeks before they graduate.