Pomp and Circumstance will be played, mortarboard caps flung skyward. Over the next two weeks, most Sonoma County high schools will hold graduation ceremonies — in most cases for the first time in person in two years.
Forgive members of the Class of 2021 if they’re not feeling especially nostalgic about the past four years, if they’re eager — bordering on desperate — to get their high school experience in the rearview mirror and move on with their lives.
These are the Sonoma County teens who endured a lifetime’s worth of hardship just while they were in high school. The catastrophic wildfires that devastated the North Bay their freshman year ushered in what’s become a stressful but quickly familiar fall ritual of torched homes, evacuations, power blackouts, smoke-choked air and eerie skies. When they were sophomores, much of the region was challenged by a historic, atmospheric-river induced flood. And their junior and senior years were transformed, by the way, by the worst pandemic in a century.
Proms and dances were canceled, as were class trips, debates and entire sports seasons. Campuses were abandoned, friendships and memories were left unforged, the slog of remote learning leaving in its wake disappointment and sadness around what might have been.
But there were also upsides, minor victories amid the struggles. With vaccinations rising in the county and the transmission of the COVID-19 falling, Healdsburg High School principal Bill Halliday gave the green light for an outdoor prom, to delight of senior class president Fiona Affronti, who along with her fellow class officers had three weeks to pull off that event.
“Our theme,” recalled Affronti, who will attend UC Santa Barbara this fall, “was ‘Fly Me To The Moon.’ We spent way too much time trying to build a 9-foot crescent moon out of cardboard, for a photo backdrop.”
In the end, she said, “We just went with a lot of duct tape.”
Among the admirable qualities of this group of seniors: they were deeply resourceful and resilient. Dealt a lousy hand, again and again, they had to be. To understand what they went through, The Press Democrat spoke with eight members of the Class of 2021. Three lost their houses in the 2017 firestorm which destroyed more than 5,300 homes across the county just six weeks into their freshman year. All experienced sorrow and loss, but they also exhibited courage, adaptability and pluck.
Hard and humbling
Cami Loxley had never heard her mother scream so loudly.
It was just after midnight on Oct. 9, 2017, in their Fountaingrove home. The Tubbs fire was already in the Santa Rosa neighborhood. Using a tone and volume they’d never heard before, Emine Loxley informed her four children that they needed to get out, now.
Then a freshman at Cardinal Newman High School, Cami grabbed her backpack and uniform. But there was no school the next day, or the next week, or the next. The fire took out 18 of Newman’s 35 classrooms, plus the library, main office and other buildings. For the next three months, the freshmen took classes on a satellite campus six miles away in west Santa Rosa. While that isolation kept them from getting to know Newman’s older students, who’d been dispatched to other satellite campuses scattered throughout the city, “our class did get really close,” said Loxley, who is headed for San Diego State University.
Having escaped with little more than what they were wearing, Cami and her siblings needed clothes in the days after the fire. They went to a clothes drive. It was hard, and humbling, she recalled, “going through piles of strangers’ clothing with a bunch of other people.”
It was also life-changing.
“That experience opened my heart,” said Loxley, who has since been a regular volunteer at the Redwood Empire Food Bank.
Those months in modules on satellite locations, combined with class cancellations on account of wildfires, then distance learning necessitated by the pandemic — this year’s Newman seniors were off campus for 1½ of their four years of high school, estimated Graham Rutherford, the school’s dean of student life.
Roughly a sixth of Newman’s 600 students lost their homes in the Tubbs fire, and like Loxley, Newman classmate Andrew DeMarinis was one of that affected group. The loss “was definitely tough,” said the senior, who is bound for UC Berkeley where he plans to study philosophy. But “it’s certainly not the worst thing that could happen. So you get through it.”
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