TRURO — The mood among the members of the Class of 2025 at Nauset Regional High School gathered at Truro Vineyards for the senior banquet on May 30 was, by turns, apprehensive and eager.
Thoughts of jobs, college, moves, and the wider world were on the students’ minds as they swapped stories, posed for photos, and signed yearbooks in the dusky sunlight that emerged at the end of an overcast day.
The idea of graduating, said Joey Smith of Orleans, was making him feel “a little bit panicky.”
It’s “terrifying,” said Ronan Iles of Brewster. “The way the entire world seems to be going puts me ill at ease — coming into a world where I’m fending for myself.”
Some students, though, are focused on their next moves: “I love the Cape,” said Niev Witnauer of Wellfleet, “but I’m excited to live in a bigger town.” She is headed to Smith College in Northampton in the fall and plans to study classics.
Brianna Wall, who was class president in both her junior and senior years, said she thought the disruptions of Covid and the high school’s renovations had prepared her class well for uncertainty.
“We’re used to the ground shaking under us,” she said — sometimes literally, in the case of the bulldozing. “We’re a really adaptable and resilient class.”
Wall said she was steadied by making amateur pottery on Wednesday afternoons at Clay Club. “I think it helped my mental health to go and mess around with clay, use my hands, and create stuff,” she said. She was proud of a small mug she made with a greenish-blue glaze. “Nothing too complicated,” she said. In the fall, she plans to study cell biology at Providence College.
Moments of Courage and Surprise
As they weighed the uncertain times, many students recalled moments over the past four years when they surprised themselves, tried something new, and found gumption that they didn’t know they had.
Liv Prince, a violinist in the school orchestra, had been learning tenor saxophone for only a year when she joined the jazz band last fall.
Taking up jazz mere months before a performance was daunting, Prince said. Her friend Lauren deRuyter, who has played baritone sax since sixth grade, helped give Prince the confidence to dive in. So did orchestra and jazz conductor Daniel Anthony, whom Prince called “one of the most positive forces in my life for the past four years.”
On Saturday, the ensemble performed their last concert together, playing Buddy Rich’s standard “Birdland” as their opening number at the Nauset Alumni Jazz Festival.
For Kayleen Harvey and Carolline Rodrigues, beach trips and field hockey punctuated their memories of Nauset, along with something more unexpected: the chance to manage the boys’ varsity basketball team in junior year.
“We wanted community service hours,” said Harvey. The varsity boys needed the support, and Harvey and Rodrigues signed up.
“We didn’t know anything about basketball,” said Rodrigues.
They said they weren’t left much of a blueprint from the team’s previous managers. “I think they quit,” said Harvey. But she and Rodrigues stuck it out, gaining confidence as they coordinated schedules and transportation with coaches and recorded video for the team. They also learned where the three-point line is on the court.
Jack Martin, a left defender for the Nauset boys’ hockey team, won’t soon forget the team’s historic March night at TD Garden — as much for putting his body on the line to stop a Medfield goal in the final period as for their Division 3 victory.
“The puck did not get past me,” he said. “I don’t know if you saw a guy crawling around the ice with six minutes left, but that was me.”
Staying and Leaving
Kimesha Harriott will be leaving her position as president of Nauset’s multicultural club upon graduation, but she’s confident that the club will be in capable hands. Shakira Brooker, who lives in Provincetown, will be the president next year, Harriott says, pointing to her friend in a group picture in the yearbook.
At a predominantly white high school, she said, the club’s goal was to bring the language, food, and music of less-represented cultures to the fore.
In weekly meetings, members invited French, Jamaican, and Haitian Creole speakers to celebrate the idiosyncrasies of language; they hosted performances by Cape Verdean singer Candida Rose and Mashpee guitarist Tim Perry Rocks; and they cooked Jamaican specialties for fellow students: stew and jerk chicken, white rice with plantains, and festivals, a kind of fried bread.
“It’s our way of fitting into the world and helping these kids fit into our world,” Harriott said.
Harriott plans to stay on the Cape for now, attending Cape Cod Community College for two years. There, she wants to seek out similar clubs or “even form my own again” before transferring in pursuit of a degree in elementary education.
Toni-Anne Fraser, a Provincetown Schools graduate who used to live in Truro but now lives in Harwich, will also attend 4Cs. She plans to study architecture — an interest piqued over three years of electives with teacher Richard Tichnor.
Not all the students are staying close to home. Saffron Jalbert of Eastham plans to study photography, mixed media, and sculpture at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia. She’s inspired by the photographs of teacher Jodi Birchall, who showed Jalbert how to develop 16mm film rolls in the school’s darkroom.
Her friend Victor Smith of Brewster is also leaving the Cape. He said he judged early that school activities didn’t really mesh with his interests. More to his taste was peer mentor work at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum and rainy production days with friends, recording and mixing music videos.
“I want to score movies,” he said. In a month, he says, he is driving to Arizona to begin studies in audio engineering at the Conservatory of Recording Arts and Sciences.
The trepidation, said Lucy Keigans of Wellfleet, is partly that “we’ve grown up in such a bubbling, secure environment.” Keigans is headed to the College of Charleston in South Carolina.
What she’s looking for, besides a nursing degree, is the pulse of a city and a sunset that happens after 4 p.m. in January. Whatever challenges are ahead, she knows that memories of hiking through the Outer Cape woods will help to clear her mind.
