'Forever live out the legacy': La Reina High honors its last graduates
As the first familiar notes of "Pomp and Circumstance" began to play Friday, the sun broke through a bank of silver clouds just as the 30 members of La Reina High School and Middle School's class of 2024 stepped into view.
The last graduates of the all-girls Catholic school marched in slow rhythm toward the front lawn. Each wore a white cap and gown and carried a bouquet of yellow roses.
The Thousand Oaks campus will shut down entirely in coming days.
The Sisters of Notre Dame, a Catholic religious order that founded La Reina in 1964, announced in January that they would be closing down the school due to dwindling enrollment and unsustainable finances.
An attempt by some of the school's parents, alumnae and staff to preserve La Reina's spirit by launching their own school in Moorpark fell short earlier this month when the project failed to hit its enrollment goals.
On Friday evening, the legacy La Reina will leave behind was impossible to ignore as dozens of past graduates joined parents, family and friends to fill the plastic chairs on the school's lawn to celebrate the final commencement.
"We will show the world what a La Reina girl can do," Salutatorian Maybelle Soice said as she kicked off the ceremony. "Keeping the legacy, changing the world."
The celebration remained staunchly focused on the graduating class, but the school's closure still loomed over proceedings. Valedictorian Claire Lewon told attendees that this year's goodbyes are "undeniably" La Reina's most difficult.
"Graduates, classmates, sisters, as the last graduating class of La Reina, I implore you to be diligent to forever live out its legacy, passing it down from person to person, generation to generation, ensuring that it is truly everlasting," Lewon said.
Joan Petrone, the chair of La Reina's history department, read off each student's name as interim Principal Rebecca Adams presented each with a diploma.
Petrone's voice nearly broke with emotion as she invited the newly minted graduates to shift the tassels on their caps from right to left.
Together, the graduates stood for La Reina's traditional yellow rose ceremony, delivering single stems to mothers and boutonnieres to fathers.
As the ceremony drew to a close, Adams invited the students and alumnae gathered in the crowd to stand and join the new graduates in a final rendition of La Reina's alma mater.
More than 100 women and girls rose to their feet. Some stood together, wrapping arms around old classmates.
"We will always praise, defend all that's good," they sang, a cappella. "Esteem the right and fair, love and cherish every memory and be worthy of the name we bear."
Then, again, "Pomp and Circumstance" played. One by one, and slowly, the graduates marched off, exiting the way they came.
Isaiah Murtaugh covers education for the Ventura County Star in partnership with Report for America. Reach him at isaiah.murtaugh@vcstar.com or 805-437-0236 and follow him on Twitter @isaiahmurtaugh and @vcsschools. You can support this work with a tax-deductible donation to Report for America.
This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: La Reina High honors its last graduates
