Ten Years Later, Back to ASB

To watch a recap of the day on YouTube, click HERE!

There is something about walking back through the doors of your school after a decade that no photograph can quite prepare you for. For the Class of 2016, that moment arrived this year, when more than 40 alumni gathered at ASB to mark ten years since they crossed the stage at graduation.

In addition, more than 30 former and current teachers joined them, and together they filled the campus with the kind of energy that only happens when people who genuinely shaped each other's lives find themselves in the same room again.

The reunion was organized by classmate Laura Sabaté, whose care and effort gave the day its shape: a tour of the campus, a paella lunch in the sun, and hours of unhurried conversation with the teachers and faces they had missed. For many, it was their first time back at ASB since they left. The school had changed in some ways and stayed exactly the same in others.

Alumni had traveled from Los Angeles, New York, Texas, Chicago, Oslo, London, and Madrid to be there. Some had not seen each other in years. Some had never quite lost touch. All of them, it seemed, needed this.

The day had its quiet highlights and its louder ones. Among the latter: an impromptu sing-along of a song the group had learned as elementary students with Ms. Nancy Boyd, which surfaced from memory with surprising ease and filled the space in a way that caught more than a few off guard. It was the kind of moment that reminds you that certain things from childhood do not really leave you; they just wait.

One of our newer alums, Mr. Bill Volchok, joined the celebration, as did Ms. Marta Vernet, a long-serving staff member and Laura's mother, whose presence added a particularly personal warmth to the occasion.

To mark the reunion, our Director of Alumni Relations, Michelle Collin, created a newly designed t-shirt for the class, featuring a hand-drawn illustration of the original main gate of campus by long serving guard, Manuel Hernández, whose familiar face has greeted students at the gate for years. It was a fittingly personal touch for a day built around exactly that.

Ten years is both a long time and, on a day like this, almost nothing at all. Welcome back, Lynxes!

To watch a recap of the day on YouTube, click HERE - created by ASB alumni, Elizabeth (Eli) García Carné from the Class of 1999, with her communications agency, Modula TV.