Gryphon Gallery: The First Graduates of Glenlyon Norfolk School – 1986

Megan Atchley, Claire Banister, Rasma Bertz, Davina Bhandar, Judy Chiu, Kit Lee, Joanne Damant, Carolyn Deeprose, Karen Ellis, Celeste Hambleton, Anne Heath, Christine Horodyski, Vonnie Iskander, Petra Johns, Emma Marley, Hallie Palmer, Alison Pledger, Mary Plommer, Karen Raz, Caroline Riedel, Nikki Van Hasselt, and Christine Young sit together as the first graduates in GNS history.

As the students of the school’s 2024 graduating class conclude the many activities connected to their final year, it might surprise you to know that the first graduating class of Glenlyon-Norfolk School, a brand new amalgamated school of a former girls and boys school, Norfolk House and Glenlyon, consisted of 22 girls. These girls entered their Grade 12 year as members of NHS, with no knowledge that they would graduate from GNS. Half way through their 1985-86 school year, the voting members of both Norfolk House School and Glenlyon School communities, after a number of years of thinking about and planning for a workable  amalgamation, finally ‘sealed-the-deal’ with membership approval on February 11th 1986 and followed by the legal documents signed on March 6th 1986.

Consequently, at that point, Norfolk House and Glenlyon Schools officially became Glenlyon-Norfolk School, although from a practical sense students of both schools completed their school year with a Closing that followed the traditional lines of their previous schools – that was as Grade 12’s at NHS and Grade 10’s at Glenlyon, although the Graduation Dance was a combined event at the Empress.

In the meantime, extensive and ground-breaking preparations were being made for a new Board and school leadership, school structure, staffing, curricula, school symbols, and new, essential facilities.

*It is very interesting to also note that for the following school year, the first full-year as GNS, that due to Glenlyon only going to Grade 10 and therefore not having a naturally progressed boy for Grade 12, that Jeremy Smith, who had left Glenlyon as a Grade 10 student in 1985, returned to GNS as the only Grade 12 boy and became automatic Head Boy in the class of 1986-87. Jeremy was in fact the first Glenlyon alumni in its 54 year history to actually ‘graduate’ from its senior class (Grade 10) after five years at the school and then again from Grade 12 as the first male GNS alumni from Glenlyon to fully graduate.