Our opinion: Administration deserves praise for its dedicated effort to get our school back up and running and opening on schedule

The administration, led by Principal Mrs. Julie Barthel with the help of many, many dedicated educators, has done an outstanding job ensuring that students have been able to safely return to the Hill. 

With much support, the three major groups that have made this all possible are the safety task force, academic task force and financial task force teams. They have gone above and beyond to make Cathedral the safest school possible with steps that include upgrading the ventilation system, creating a detailed reopening plan, coordinating a mass disinfecting of the entire school and many more efforts, which you can read more about elsewhere in this issue.

In addition to these changes, the school has set up cameras inside the classrooms, so if students are unable to attend school, they will still be able to learn about the new COVID safety procedures and policies that will be discussed on the first two days. The academic task force team has also demonstrated proactivity by already creating a hybrid model that will be ready to implement if the Marion County Health Department requires it.

So, on behalf of the whole student body, thank you for all your efforts, dedication, diligence and sacrificed time. Without your hard work, it’s quite possible that students would have to endure another semester or even another year of virtual learning, which is no fun at all and takes away from what we experience on this campus — a caring, nurturing environment.

The Megaphone staff is especially grateful that the Class of 2021 will get the opportunity to return to campus for their final year on the Hill. Even with the Covid-19 and construction restrictions combined, it still means a lot that we will go to in-person classes and see our Cathedral family every day. 

However, in order to keep it this way, students, it’s our job to uphold the rules and do our part. Keeping our masks on, washing our hands and the continuous applying of social distancing guidelines, we can all have the school year we’ve been waiting for during the past five months.

Our first two days, with only half the student body on campus each of those two days, went great. Now it’s up to us to make sure we do our part so that we can see our friends, learn from our teachers and carry out excellence, this year’s theme, together on our campus rather than separately from our homes.