The 75-year-old Oakland Catholic high school has pulled the Pride and Progress flags from its classrooms and offices and replaced them with an in-house rainbow-watercolor version of its own logo — the "Inclusive O," rolled out at this month's student orientation.

On the walls at 9500 Stearns Avenue, in the Sequoyah hills of East Oakland, the flag came down and a logo went up.

Bishop O'Dowd High School — Catholic, 75 years on the same campus above the 580 — announced this month that it will no longer display the Pride flag in its classrooms, offices and shared spaces. In its place is something the school made itself: the "Inclusive O," a rainbow-watercolor treatment of the school's own angular capital-O logo, underscored with three lowercase words — seen. known. loved.

The colors are the ones you'd expect — red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet — but they're smudged into the letter like an impressionist wash of leaves rather than laid down in the flag's clean horizontal bars. On the school's own page for the symbol, O'Dowd calls it "a visible expression" that "LGBTQ+ students, families, faculty, and staff are welcomed, valued, supported, and belong here." It says the O "is now displayed throughout classrooms, offices, and shared spaces across campus," introduced to students at orientation.

The letter to families came from president Kim Walsh, who has led the school since July 2023. In it, according to KRON4, which first reported the change, Walsh framed the switch against a wider backdrop: "questions about Pride and Progress flags have become part of a much larger conversation taking place throughout the Catholic Church and in the United States." Of O'Dowd specifically, she wrote that "last year, this became a lightning rod within our community."

What the school is careful to say did not change is the programming underneath the symbol. Its page lists the Unity Club and Pride Arts Club as continuing, along with an annual Inclusive Family Day, a community art workshop this month, a family retreat and a new "Inclusive Advisory Council." Questions, it says, go to Armando Diaz, the Director of Equity & Belonging. "Our symbols may evolve," the page reads. "Our commitment to students does not."

O'Dowd is not a solitary case. The school has flown Pride flags in classrooms since the 1990s, and the Diocese of Oakland — which oversees nine high schools and some 44 elementary schools — has spent recent years navigating its own tensions over LGBTQ+ symbols and guidance.

What a student walking into orientation this month actually sees, then, is subtraction and substitution on the same wall: no flag, and in its place the school's letter, rendered in watercolor.