The Jesuit Central-Southern provincial, Fr. Tom Greene, S.J., along with SLUH President Alan Carruthers and SLUH Principal Ian Gibbons, S.J. signed the Jesuit sponsorship agreement at the Mass of the Holy Spirit on Aug. 18. The signing formally ended a year-long process that involved a thorough examination of SLUH to review its focus on the Jesuit tradition and mission.

In January 2019, SLUH began its Jesuit Sponsorship review process, something that every Jesuit high school undergoes every six or seven years, to ensure that the high school is fulfilling the Jesuit mission.  After the review is completed, the school and the province will sign an agreement that allows the school to call itself an official Jesuit school and a part of the local province. 

 In the first phase of the accreditation, the school undergoes a self-evaluation led by a committee made up of faculty and staff. This committee, led by English teacher Steve Missey, looked at all aspects of the school to assess where they think the school is succeeding in fulfilling the Jesuit mission and where it is has room to grow. 

“It is good to be able to step back and see these issues from a 30,000-foot view,” said Missey. “Because in our day-to-day life, these issues often get jumbled up and it is good to do some deliberate planning on how to address them.” 

After the committee completed its internal review of SLUH, a team from the provincial’s office, made up of two provincial staff members and three administrators from other Jesuit high schools, traveled to SLUH to conduct its own assessment. 

“To receive feedback from people I very much trust, that are colleagues in Jesuit education, and to hear what they were doing well is great,” said Gibbons. “You can’t improve if your blind spots are preventing you from seeing those things.”

Upon finalizing its review, the visiting team submitted its own report that outlined three areas of the school that they saw needed improvement, which were: technology, student mental health, and spiritual development for teachers. Then, in order to complete the Sponsorship Agreement process, SLUH had three months to articulate a plan for each of the three areas for growth.

For Gibbons, SLUH’s technology policy represents an area where a significant amount of work and revision need to be done in order to make it more effective.  

“I inherited a school that had a 1-to-1 technology program that basically evolved into what it was without a whole lot of discernment, without a whole lot of clear objective thinking,” said Gibbons. “It basically has been frozen in that state and it is high time that we think of a stronger way that we look at technology.”

SLUH’s current technology policy requires freshmen and sophomores to have their own iPad, but allows juniors and seniors to bring the device of their choice. The committee realized that this current plan made it both confusing and complicated for teachers and students alike, who have to adapt to new devices and teach students who have a variety of different devices. 

“In some ways, it is the worst of all worlds as a system,” said Gibbons. “All the good things you create with an iPad you then lose when everybody is doing something different, but you also limit yourself with the iPad. So by the time a freshman is a junior or senior they are kind of locked into this system where not everybody is using the same thing.”

In response, SLUH was planning on conducting a comprehensive overview and revision of the current 1:1 technology policy for the 2020-2021 school year, but the COVID-19 pandemic halted that study early on and forced the faculty and staff to quickly adapt to an online learning program.

“We were at a disadvantage than other schools going in because we didn’t have one platform, we didn’t have a culture where there is a strong emphasis on online learning,” said Gibbons.  

Facing the challenge of having to use only technology to deliver a high-quality Jesuit education to students in an online format, the faculty had to come face to face with the technology issues that the Sponsorship Review had noted just months before.

“We have not solved all of our problems by any stretch, but because of the pandemic, we are in a very different place as a school in terms of seeing and appreciating and harnessing some of that power that technology offers,” said Missey. “Life basically said, ‘you figure this out or school doesn't happen.’”

Another issue caused by the pandemic, and one that the Sponsorship Review also highlighted as an area for growth, was helping students with their mental and emotional well-being. Even before the lockdown, the administration realized that they needed to place a stronger emphasis on caring for students' emotional health. The lockdown and forced isolation, forced the school to come up with a proactive and deliberate plan to reach students most likely to face anxiety and stress issues. 

“You are locking people up, you are isolating them, you’re not allowing them that human contact, and there is massive stress of this whole pandemic and the unknown, and the question of how are we going to survive this,” said Gibbons. “All of these pieces mean that we couldn’t have picked a better area to focus on and we have done a lot of great work in this area of student well-being.”

Finally, the team and committee noted that there was room to grow programs for the spiritual development of the teachers and staff at SLUH, specifically in regards to the Spiritual Exercises. The Spiritual Exercises is one of three foundational documents of the Society of Jesus, which outlines a four-week program that helps to guide the retreatant in discerning God’s will in his or her life. The Spiritual Exercises are already a big part in the development of students’ spiritual lives, with many of the SLUH retreats containing different elements of the Spiritual Exercises. However, the committee found them lacking in the formation of teachers' spiritual lives. 

 “The Spiritual Exercises are huge for the Jesuits,” said Gibbons. “A lot of our retreat models, and of the things we do are aligned with the Spiritual Exercises. So the question that the group came to us with is why aren’t you delivering the Spiritual Exercises to the teachers, the administrators, and even the students in some regard.”

In an effort to provide teachers with a chance to develop their spiritual lives, the administration has formed a group of spiritual directors that are well-versed in the Spiritual Exercises. The administration is also making time in the schedule so that the faculty can partake in retreats and other formation experiences. 

“If we have directors and great programs but we don’t release the faculty from the things that they need to be doing—to teach—it is never going to happen,” said Gibbons. “You will have the pieces but it will never actualize so that’s a failure.” 

More formal, systematic work on these areas for growth has been postponed while the faculty and staff have been working on establishing a new hybrid school format. 

“Since March, everybody has been all hands on deck with getting students back to school in some form,” said Missey. 

The effects of the Sponsorship Review are still affecting every single way that the school operates and runs because without the Jesuit Sponsorship Review, SLUH would lose its Jesuit identity. 

“SLUH is a very famous, recognized school,” said Gibbons. “A huge part of that is our Jesuit tradition, our Jesuit philosophy, our Jesuit mission, and to give that up would be a huge loss. What is SLUH High without the Jesuits? Now that is a tough question.”