The National JEA/NSPA Journalism Convention was recently held in St. Louis, nearby to Liberty’s hometown. The trip began Thursday, leaving school at 1 p.m, to then spending two nights at the Grand Marriott hotel until around 6 p.m. Saturday.

While on their trip, sometime late on Friday night, a group of four students had to evacuate their hotel room, well past curfew. Their room’s air conditioning had broken, and even after calling an engineer on the room’s phone to try and resolve the issue, it was deemed unfixable during the given time. 

Junior Liz Hayes was involved, commenting that when the group had come back from sessions, their room was very hot. 

“[The thermostat] said 80 degrees, and I’m pretty sure it was like 95 by the time we actually went into the hallway. No one could breathe and we [had] called an engineer,” Hayes expressed. By the time the group had gone into the hallway for fresher air, it was around 11 p.m.

“I have vocal cord dysfunction and so I find it hard to breathe sometimes, and because our room is so hot and stuffy my throat actually closed up. It was really scary for me,” stated junior Megan Geisler. “I actually had to use my oxygen tank.”

Geisler had to then go and wake up her advisor, Jonathan Hall, around 12:30 a.m, and documented that she, “went next door and started banging on his door really hard, and he would not wake up, and I just had to keep knocking and knocking until he finally opened the door.”

She added that she was rambling, and so a disoriented Hall responded with a very tired, “What?” 

Geisler commented, “He was really sleepy, and I don’t think he understood me at all.”

Geisler added that after several minutes of waiting for his instruction on whether or not the group was allowed to switch rooms, he finally popped out and told us to choose what was best. 

“We were all just kind of standing in the hallway and we were all falling asleep,” Geisler commented. 

Hayes heavily stressed that, “The filter was basically black and the compressor apparently broke. By the time it was 1 a.m. we ended up changing rooms, which was not fun.” 

Once everyone was settled into their new room on a different floor, they all fell asleep and all was well.

Despite barely getting any sleep, the group still had fun on the trip.