The Final Homecoming : Alumni Plan Send-Off for Soon-to-Close Palos Verdes High

Marsha Kasunich-Baragosh, class of ‘66, recalls her days at Palos Verdes High School as a time when girls were required to wear a dress or skirt, the Hawthorne-bred Beach Boys could be booked for a campus dance, and a teacher could still afford a home on the peninsula.

“It was a very country-clubbish atmosphere,” Kasunich-Baragosh said. “In my era there was so much money here for the school district” that its instructors were among the highest-paid in the nation.

Those days have long disappeared, and, come June, so will Palos Verdes High. This spring’s graduating seniors will be the last for the 30-year-old school, which is being shut down because of declining enrollment.

So Kasunich-Baragosh and other alumni have decided to hold a big bash on campus May 11. For the past several weeks, alumni have been busy contacting thousands of former Palos Verdes High students across the country for what is being called “The Final Homecoming.”

Although the homecoming organizers say they do not know how many of the school’s 15,000 to 16,000 graduates to expect, the number could easily be more than a thousand. Included will be the school’s first principal, Lucile Crain, who is flying in from her Florida home to attend the event.

“We don’t want any morbid kind of thing,” said Jim Kinney, one of the school’s first instructors, who now serves as its director of student activities. “We want to go out with dignity and style and class and fun and remembering the best.”

Both Palos Verdes High, on the far west side of the peninsula, and Miraleste High School, on the east side, are slated to be converted to intermediate schools next fall under a plan approved by Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified School District trustees.

The plan, adopted in the wake of declining districtwide enrollment and mounting financial problems, faces a legal challenge mounted by parents who want the schools to remain open. However, the district is assigning all its high school students to the Rolling Hills High School campus, which is being renamed Palos Verdes Peninsula High School.

A Rolling Hills High School administrator said several events have been proposed to mark that school’s name change and transformation into the district’s only high school.

At Miraleste, Principal Andy Seymour said a final reunion for alumni was held three years ago when the district approved an earlier plan that would have closed only Miraleste.

Seymour said Miraleste officials mulled over the idea of holding another reunion this year, but decided against it. Instead, a barbecue will be held on campus after the seniors’ graduation June 20.

“We were not sure whether it would be something people would be enthusiastic about again,” Seymour said.

The idea to hold the Palos Verdes High reunion is credited to the school’s present students and to Kinney, who came to the school as a history teacher when it opened in 1961 as the district’s first high school.

The Los Angeles Unified School District had already begun construction of a junior high school on the 42-acre site, but the school was unfinished when the Palos Verdes school district was formed and acquired it.

Kinney said Palos Verdes High “shouldn’t just dribble off to nothingness,” but he also wanted to make sure no event was planned that would interfere with events planned for this year’s graduating seniors.

Because the school’s students always hold an annual spring carnival on a Friday, Kinney said, he and some students proposed switching the date to a Saturday and turning it into the school’s final homecoming. They then contacted alumni, who liked the idea.

To contact former graduates, alumni are using address lists compiled by other former students who have been in charge of organizing class reunions. A flyer with an RSVP form was prepared by alumna Peggi Collins and mailed out.

Even though some of the more recent graduating classes have not held reunions, the homecoming’s organizers are optimistic that those former students can be reached.

“A lot of them, their parents still live on the hill, and a lot of them from more recent classes are still in college,” Collins said. “It is our hope we can get addresses from all 30 years.”

Kinney said he receives about 40 responses a day from alumni, with an average of about three saying they plan to attend. He said he expects that more than 1,000 alumni and their family members will attend the homecoming, which will be open to the entire community.

“Our returns have been fabulous,” Kinney said. “I have heard from Canada and France and at least half the states in the union.”

One person who will not have to travel far is Chris Miloe, a Rolling Hills Estates resident who was in the school’s first graduating class. Before the school opened, he and his friends were bused to Narbonne High School in Harbor City. Other friends attended private schools on the peninsula. When Palos Verdes High opened, they were all able to attend school together.

Miloe said that it is ironic that his daughter, now a junior at Miraleste, will have to attend the newly designated Palos Verdes Peninsula High next year.

“She’ll have one year at the new school, and I had one year at the new school,” he said.