SF State has officially cancelled all face-to-face classes effective Tuesday, March 10. This announcement came through an email on Monday evening issued by SF State President Lynn Mahoney. The email states that all courses which are already offered online will continue as usual, but staff and faculty will have a week to accommodate the rest of their classes to be taught via remote instruction. The email also states that during this time off, staff and student employees will continue to be paid.  

Laura Miles, a child and adolescent development lecturer, who was in the middle of teaching class, said that although she anticipated classes being canceled she didn’t expect it to come in the middle of her lecture. “I just went okay, what’re we going to do now? Students aren’t going to pay attention, and they’re going to leave even though it says we’re going to start tomorrow. So we just wrapped up and I said I’d be in touch,” she said. 

“I was completely surprised when the email got out,” said Joshua Johnson, a third-year physiology major. “They had been warning us for the past two weeks about it, but I was completely caught off guard.” Johnson was just leaving his class when he got the email, and says he has no idea how he will complete his upcoming lab assignments. “Probably, it’s just going to be a lot of online aspect like on Zoom. I’ve never used that app before, but I guess we’re going to use that to talk about the labs. I don’t know how to practice them though online.”  

Samuel Ponder, a third-year theatre arts major, was leaving the library when he got the email. “I was actually going to do a scene this Wednesday for my acting three class, but now that’s cancelled so I don’t have to do that,” he said.  

Lorenzo Ramos, a second-year hospitality and tourism management major, who gathered over 6,500 signatures on a petition to shut down classes was at work when he heard the news. “My friends blew up my phone and said look what happened,” he said. “I literally started dancing at my post; it was so cool.”  

Although President Mahoney never formally acknowledged the petition, Ramos believes that his efforts helped prompt the school’s decision. “I’m going to say her silence is a forfeit, and that means we won by default so I could really care less if she honestly ever says it was because of the petition or whatever,” he said. “I’m going to book my flight home so I can see my family because that is the most important thing to me.”