Los Altos High’s Class of 2022 reflects on coming of age during COVID

Los Altos High School graduated nearly 550 seniors June 3, the first time in two years that the high school held the ceremony on campus.

As “Pomp and Circumstance” rang out over the crowd of family and friends, graduates filed out onto the football field and into bleachers behind the stage, abuzz with anticipation for the annual tradition. The ceremony was marked by one resounding theme: how graduates rose to the challenge of the pandemic.

“We’ve been away from this tradition for two years, and it is so good to be back,” LAHS Principal Wynne Satterwhite said as she addressed the crowd. “The class of 2022’s high school experience has been a rollercoaster.”

As ninth graders in 2018, Satterwhite said, the now-graduates embarked on what everyone thought would be a typical high school experience full of school photos, class schedules, extracurricular activities, braces and awkward coming-of-age memories — and for that first year, they did.

In tenth grade, the class of 2022 started the year navigating “a campus under construction,” Satterwhite said, and “the long walks across campus required by that change.”

But the biggest change was yet to come: in March 2020, COVID-19 brought normalcy to a grinding halt, and students found themselves in virtual classrooms.

Graduating senior Isa Galvan, who’s heading to University of California, Merced, in the fall, said distance learning came with layers of challenges.

“It was a little difficult for me, being a person who is low-income, my family had their struggles. We didn’t have work, we relied on food boxes,” Galvan told the Voice after the ceremony. “Even our Wi-Fi wasn’t good, so studying was hard. But I had the motivation to just keep pushing through.”

Satterwhite commended the class of 2022 for finding new ways to “connect with and support the community” as they navigated the struggles of being away from their peers and teachers.

“While they tried to adapt to constant changes in their schooling, they watched and participated in social justice movements,” she said during the ceremony.

Satterwhite presented graduates Tomoki Chien, Diya Gupta and Romeo Bienvenido Villanueva with Eagle Awards, an LAHS honor for scholarship, citizenship and leadership.

“I watched our students find what they were passionate about, and use the time that was lost to lengthen their strides taken this year,” Gupta, one of two student speakers at the ceremony, said during her speech. “Students discovered their calling to social justice and alleviating the various inequities present within our society through protesting, pushed for Green Ribbon School certification and continued to create new clubs to add to our school’s already expansive list.”

Senior year is often regarded as the year of “lasts,” Gupta said. “Our last homecomings, our last lip sync battles, our last Clash of the Classes.”

“However, for us,” she said, “a class that matured throughout the course of the pandemic, it served as a lot of our firsts.”

As students walked across the stage and received their diplomas, cheers rose from supporters stationed in the crowd, and children squealed as their older siblings’ names echoed across the field. As the last graduate walked across the stage, the audience roared with applause, and the class of 2022 tossed their caps toward the sky.

The full list of graduates can be found here.

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