School portraits / Junior-Senior Surprise, one senior year
Crystal Springs Juniors Whisk the Seniors to an Undisclosed Location
At a Hillsborough school, one day a year the juniors plan everything and the seniors are not told where they're going. I am the man the seniors need a break from.
I am the person at every party who asks a high school senior where they're applying. I know it's a terrible question. I ask it anyway, the way some people can't walk past a bowl of nuts. Last Thanksgiving I asked the same nephew twice, once over the turkey and once over the pie, and he answered both times, which is the kind of patience colleges should be told about.
So I have a professional interest in Crystal Springs Uplands School in Hillsborough, California, where every year the junior class plans a surprise day off campus for the seniors, who are, in the school's word, "unsuspecting."
The procedure is simple and, from the seniors' side, total. On the chosen day they are "abruptly whisked away from their regular classes, dressed up, and taken to a previously undisclosed location" for games. The school's news page does not disclose the location either. It has a photo gallery. It has discipline.
For one day, nobody can ask a Crystal senior where they're going. They genuinely do not know.
The school's traditions page sells Junior-Senior Surprise as a choice of roles: you either plan the fun day for the seniors or "experience the thrill of the unknown." Every senior gets one of each, a year apart. First you are the organizer with the secret. Then you are the one in a costume, on a bus, being handled by people a year younger than you, who will not answer questions.
I have been on that bus. It's called parenthood. The middle one runs our weekends now with roughly the same transparency.
Crystal also has Snow Day, an unexpected day free from classes and homework, announced on the San Francisco Peninsula, where it does not snow. The traditions page admits as much: "Even though we're on the peninsula," it says, the day gives students a taste of colder climates. A school that cancels classes for weather it doesn't have understands something about seventeen-year-olds that I do not.
I am trying to learn. On Saturday the eldest, a junior, came downstairs with her keys, and I opened my mouth to ask where she was going. Then I closed it. She looked at me with great suspicion. "Undisclosed location," she said, and left, and I have since been told it was the dentist.
Sources
The public records, school pages and published accounts this story draws on. Where the story imagines a scene or a line of dialogue, that is the column’s telling, not a quotation.
- Seniors Surprised: A Day of Fun and Friendship, Crystal crystal.org
- Traditions, Crystal Springs Uplands crystal.org
- Crystal Springs Uplands public parent reviews niche.com