The class of 2024 has left their mark on Loudoun County High School – literally. Over the last few weeks, drop cloths, ladders, and paint buckets have been stationed in the cafeteria hallway, and seniors have stamped their handprints onto an interior wall. The colorful prints are swirled into a pattern designed by SCA communications director Lindsey Johansen, and mark one of the last acts of the graduating seniors.
“I really liked the spiral idea,” Johansen said. “I just looked up ‘70s themed things and slowly added pieces to it.”
As both an art student and SCA member, Johansen is in charge of the senior mural and handprints this year, and will be working on the project during Captains Outreach. She expects to work on the project for five or six hours a day and finish in eight or nine days, well in time for graduation.
In past years, these two traditional senior artworks have been separate, but this year they will be combined. The handprints will be embellished with more ‘70s disco themed elements to make the whole mural, SCA president Madison Ruff said. The class of 2024 is the school’s 70th graduating class, and many celebrations are centered around the milestone.
The handprint mural is located on the wall facing the cafeteria, which previously was covered with the Visions of Leesburg mural, painted in 2016. The decision to cover the old artwork came with permission from principal Michelle Luttrell, Ruff said.
“We wanted it to be somewhere visible and a bunch of the empty walls were in more secluded areas,” Ruff said. “Or in inconvenient places painting wise.”
Some students this year, however, are disappointed by the decision to paint over the Visions mural. “That’s the saddest thing,” senior Isabella Villanueva said. “I just don’t really see the point in covering up something from past students. That was their work, that’s not fair to them.”
Other seniors have felt let down by the lack of individuality permitted in the mural. Senior Katherine Garvey sees senior handprints as “a representation of the individuals,” and says she has been planning hers for years.
‘You can even look at it as the idea of a fingerprint of something like that. It’s an individual person,” Garvey said. But with the cohesive design of the handprint mural this year, Garvey says, it feels “completely depersonalized.”
In the past, students have sometimes been able to use multiple colors for their handprint, paint a simple design on their hand before leaving the print, or put their print next to people special to them. All handprints this year are one of six solid colors (red, orange, yellow, and three shades of turquoise blue). Handprints are put in a certain section of the mural depending on their color, so while students may have some choice, they don’t have total freedom in designing or placing their print.
“There is nothing about it that is mine,” Garvey said. “It’s very frustrating to be thinking, ‘how am I going to show my mark left on the school when now my mark looks like every single other person’s in my grade?’ It doesn’t mean the same thing anymore.”
SCA members have received a variety of feedback on the handprints this year, and while they acknowledge and are empathetic to the differing opinions, they stand by their decisions and vision for the mural.
“I have definitely heard different things from seniors,” Johansen said. “Some really like the idea of the theme and outcome. Others didn’t agree with our choice. I have heard some negative comments, but in the end I’m hopeful that everyone will enjoy the mural and like how we are using the handprints as a part of the design.”
Ruff also explained that since the handprints and mural are integrated this year, the SCA had to be more stringent about how seniors participated and couldn’t give students as much freedom as some perhaps would have liked. She also described the tradition as collective, saying it’s about the class of 2024’s shared mark rather than the mark of each individual.
“I definitely view it as a class as a whole thing,” Ruff said. “I get where the individual perspective comes from, but at least for this year the handprints are a part of the senior mural, which is why we were stricter, since it had to fit with an overall theme.”
Contentions and disappointments aside, students still find meaning in the tradition and were excited to take part in one of their final milestones before graduation.
“You can see all of the students that went here,” Villanueva said. “It’s really cool to see everybody that’s been here has a place. It’s not like you’re going to be totally forgotten.”
