Out of the 19 seniors that did not attend the senior retreat this past weekend, at least 13 of those absences due to the rap festival Rolling Loud, which comes to the Bay Area once a year.

When the dates for the retreat were announced last spring, students had already purchased their tickets to the concert, assuming the retreat would be scheduled during two school days, as it has been in previous years. When the students discovered that the concert dates, September 15-16, conflicted with the senior retreat dates, September 16-17, they were faced with a difficult decision: miss the concert they spent money on and had been looking forward to, or miss out on a bonding opportunity with their entire class.

Senior Nate Solomon met with Dean of Student Life Programs and Senior Class Dean Cathy Chen to discuss the possibility of moving the retreat dates, but was told that the administration was not able to do so. “When I met with Ms. Chen, I basically told her what the conflict was that weekend and that I was concerned that people weren’t going to go to the senior retreat because […] they weren’t going to choose going to the senior retreat over spending their hard-earned money on concert tickets,” Solomon said. Solomon felt that if he informed the administration that there would be a significant absence of students at the retreat, they would feel compelled to change the dates.

However, Solomon  soon found out that was not a possibility. “I was told vaguely [by Ms. Chen] that due to previous complications with scheduling with sports and [Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur], that [the dates were] impossible to be moved […] under any circumstance,” Solomon said. According to Ms. Chen, the dates for the retreat were booked a year in advance, so a few months of notice was not a sufficient enough amount of time for the administration to change the dates. In addition, scheduling the retreat was a challenge from the beginning due to sports schedules and the Jewish holiday. “We couldn’t [schedule the retreat] Labor Day weekend, or [during] Rosh Hashanah, and we knew that the facility wasn’t available the 24th or the 25th [of September], so [September 16-17] was really the only date that worked,” Chen said.

After discovering that many students were considering not attending the retreat this year, the administration tried to encourage students to go and even parents to influence their kids’ decisions. At the Senior Parent Night, on Sept. 5th, Head of School Than Healy urged parents to get their students to attend the retreat. In addition, Dean of Students Tony Lapolla met with a number of students who had chosen the concert over the retreat, asking them to reconsider their decision. “Mr. Lapolla took a bunch of guys into his office and asked us to reconsider [our decision] because he thought that the senior retreat was… one of the most memorable moments from the school year and that he believes that we would regret not going,” senior Sam Untrecht said. “We told him… how we have been looking forward to this concert for a long time [so] we weren’t able to go. It wasn’t to be disrespectful towards the class, we just made a decision.”

While the students who plan to attend the concert are excited to go, they are definitely disappointed about missing the senior retreat. “We thought that [the administration] would have the option to change [the retreat date] but we understand the difficulty [in doing so] because they had already booked [the venue], so it was out of our control and out of their control and unfortunately [that the retreat and the concert] ended up conflicting,” senior Jake Coslet said. “I obviously didn’t wish this to happen, but […] they couldn’t change [the retreat dates] when we talked to them six months ago and they can’t change them now.”

The administration has remained understanding about the conflict. “I think that it’s disappointing [that some students are choosing not to go] because the goal is for [the seniors] to come together as a class and spend some time out of school just being a class together and the senior retreat is best when everybody comes,” Chen said. “You also have lives and I get it, you also have choices to make. Do I wish people would choose to go to the senior retreat? Of course I do. Can I make you go to the retreat? No. My sense is that people who are choosing not to go to the retreat feel guilty and that’s a normal feeling to have.”