After the bell rang to end first period last Thursday, many students made their way to the commons for Studium, as is the case on most B-days. But this time, instead of going to have a snack and talk with friends, it was to listen in on the presentation given by the administration about why SLUH had gone back to Condition 3 in the Covid policy, once again requiring masks in the building. 

At the start of the day, the student body and faculty received an email from Assistant Principal for Student Life Brock Kesterson announcing the listening session, which started with an explanation of the reasoning behind the return to the masked policy, and ended with an open floor where anyone could ask a question. 

“One of the things that we talked about at the administration meeting on Monday of that week was to get information out. The faculty were the first group, we saw them on Monday after school, and then had a follow up session with them on Wednesday, and then it's only logical to follow up with the student body and so that's what happened on Thursday,” Kesterson said. 

With the school going from mask mandatory to mask optional and then back to mask mandatory all in the span of two weeks, there were a lot of rumors and misinformation around the hallways, so the administration thought it would be best to address the reasons for going back to mask mandatory publicly, giving the accurate reasons to anyone who didn’t know.

“There’s a lot of misinformation out there, there's a lot of assumptions out there. And for us to be able to hear directly from students their questions, their thoughts, their understandings, was helpful,” said principal Fr. Ian Gibbons, SJ.

Because the administration wanted to have the listening session to address the rumours and confusion as soon as possible, they had to squeeze it into a busy time..

“So we were asked by the Student Council if we would have an update with masks and then an opportunity for students to ask questions. And so we said of course. Unfortunately, we had very few B-day Studiums available last week and this week, so we had to go with what we had,” said Gibbons. “It's not like there was a huge setup required, but certainly getting announcements out there because if we didn't do that we wouldn't have another opportunity to do that for four or five days. So it's a bit of a rush to get it out but what are you going to do? The other option is just wait but it's good to get information out there and give people the opportunity for a robust discussion.”

For the students who went, the session was a way to clear up the confusion they had regarding the sudden switch back to Condition 3.

“The reason I went was to clear up the confusion. Why did we have that one week where we didn’t have masks then the next week we went back? A lot of people had good questions. Personally I didn't ask any, but I liked them. I was surprised that a lot of people showed up. I thought people would speak and then we would have rebuttals, but some of the questions stumped everyone,” said senior Mikey Floretta.

Although the forum gave out a lot of information and cleared up most of the confusion, some still lingers. Students wonder how, even though the vaccination records data stayed the same, it is now no longer safe to not wear masks in the building. 

“They weren’t really clear on when the experiment would be done, they left it kind of vague, and they kind of left it early at the end. If they do it in a few weeks it’d be good. I don’t think it's SLUH’s fault that everyone is confused with the whole thing but the city’s (fault),” said senior Brendan Stein.

“We were all introduced to a condition where, for a lot of people, that was a big step for them, it was a very good moment for SLUH. In the past two years it's been crazy with all these conditions that they've put in place, it was hard to have that good moment and then be told, wait a second, we're gonna go back to Condition 3 right after what seemed like nothing had changed,” said Van Bree.

While students were grateful that the administration held an open session for everyone interested, the session left some questions unanswered.

“I personally felt like they were almost rereading some of the email that they sent out to us, which most of us read because we wanted to understand why this was happening,” said Van Bree. “At times, it felt like we were just listening to his email directly off.”

“There was a lot of tension,” agreed senior James Saadi. “Everyone was angry about something and this was the opportunity of the school to mend that. Everyone who doesn't want masks was really confused about why we need to bring them back. Especially what we saw that week with no one contracting Covid. We went there eager to see what the questions were, but a lot of the questions didn’t make any sense and Fr. Gibbons’s answers were kind of vague, he didn’t give us a timeline either. I felt like he was giving politician answers. I had the same amount of information before the forum that I had after.” 

With this being the first open forum SLUH has held all year, no one really knew what to expect. But one of the things that surprised everyone was the turnout. The Commons was as crowded as it has ever been.

“It's easy to say things like my door is always open, which is true. But how many people are really knocking on the door and talking about this and how many people do you really reach and those kinds of scenarios. So I think that we can look at, in my estimation, the success of an event like this, and you saw the numbers of people are in here, it wasn't mandatory. So people were in here because they wanted to be in here and this place was packed. So if people want to hear that information, we should be able to give them the information they're looking for,” said Kesterson.

Gibbons also appreciated the opportunity to step back and reconvene with the school community over these big issues. 

“Sometimes we can forget that this is a global crisis. It's something that's happening all over the world and it's deeply complex. There's no playbook for how to manage a school through a pandemic like this. So sometimes my team is so busy in the trenches, doing policy and activating those policies, executing the plans that sometimes we forget that not everyone has the information that we do and the timeliness of it as well,” said Gibbons.