LCHS clubs revive spring festival to share their missions

About 30 of La Cañada High School’s 60 clubs resurrected the school’s spring festival concept on Saturday, May 2 on campus, where several progressive student groups, along with carnival games, live music, food and rides, became a draw to the wider community. The idea for the free event came from the Associated Student Body (ASB).

“The clubs don’t have a venue to showcase what they do,” said Riley Owen, a junior and ASB club commissioner. “We need something other than a dance.”

Riley said the goal of the student-driven event was to connect with the younger and older residents of the community and foster a better sense of community at the school. The school’s instrumental music groups and their parents used to put on a spring carnival, but stopped a few years ago due to lack of funding.

Saturday’s festival was attended by a few hundred people and at least $2,500 was raised, according to ASB Treasurer Ben Blanco, a senior.

“We would have liked to have more people attend,” Blanco said, “but using what we learned this year, we will continue to put on bigger events like Spring Festival to build a relationship with the high school and community.”

On Saturday junior Allie Fejtek sat with several girls at their “Friendly Faces” booth filled with candy and baked goods. The newly formed club raises money for children’s hospitals. Recently, the group assembled Easter gift baskets for children at USC Verdugo Hospital. They’ve also collected toy donations.

“We just really wanted to help children,” Fejtek said. “It’s an especially scary experience being in the hospital.”

Fejtek said they would like to plan future events, even just to go spend time with children going through the experience of staying in a hospital, to provide a “friendly face.”

Another campus group participating in the festival represented their chapter of the California for Operation Underground Railroad. It serves as a linking organization, working with retired military personnel who are selected to lead missions to rescue children involved in human trafficking and sex slavery worldwide.

“It’s a big trial run,” senior Caroline Kenney, said of the LCHS chapter. “There wasn’t really anything else like this going on [at school].”

Nicole Reynolds, an eighth-grader who will be a freshman at the high school next year, stood with Kenney in the booth. Her uncle, Tim Ballard, is the founder and chief executive of Operation Underground Railroad. She aims to continue when she attends school next fall.

Several booths down, a robot wheeled around, holding a large plastic box collecting donations for the school’s engineering club. Club President Phillipp Wu and other club members wore shirts with their robotics competition team name, “The Blockheads.” The shirt also noted a key sponsor — the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“JPL is one of our main sponsors and gives us money to support our team,” Wu said.

The club mentors local elementary and middle schools in LEGO robotics and recently achieved its highest placement in the First Robotics Competition, which it has been participating in since the club began in 2008.

Junior Suren Krikorjian heads the Armenian Club at the high school. It joined the wider Los Angeles community on April 24, with approximately 130,000 people, in the Armenian Genocide centennial march on the Turkish Consulate on Wilshire Boulevard. He explained to a festival goer that it was a keenly felt experience for students who joined the club.

ASB adviser Bill Lively said the student leaders were satisfied with the outcome of Saturday’s inaugural event. “The Spring Festival Committee’s goal was to establish another great La Cañada tradition, and they believe that they certainly laid the foundation for such… today, the students were already discussing the possibility of making it a three-day event with more rides and food trucks.”

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Matt Sanderson is a contributing writer.