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Forty years later, Prout's 'girls' gather
By Arline A. Fleming/Independent Staff Writer
SOUTH KINGSTOWN — It was called Prout Memorial High School for Girls, and the name shouted proudly through the treetops on the building’s front wing facing the beach route.
Young Marcelline Richard watched the school’s construction while she passed on weekend outings with her parents as they traveled to Galilee and Scarborough State Beach.
“I have to go to that school,” she recalls telling them.
Forty years later, as that first graduating Class of 1969 came together over the weekend, Marcelline Richard Zambuco recalled her fascination with the high school.
“I was very focused on Prout. I can’t explain it. I just had this connection.”
The connection continues, and on Sunday, dug deep and spread its roots as class members came from in and out of state – including California, New Mexico and Florida – to dedicate a garden in honor of deceased class members and the religious woman who served as their first headmistress.
Prout Memorial High School, now called The Prout School, was the first Catholic high school in southern Rhode Island, opening on a piney, wooded patch of Tower Hill Road on a humid Sept. 8, 1966.
The building wasn’t finished when the sophomore class of girls, representing several surrounding towns – North Kingstown, Westerly, West Warwick and Narragansett – arrived by bus, in uniform.
“We wore those hideous gray plaid skirts, nylons, white blouses; we had indoor and outdoor shoes, maroon blazers and matching berets. At the first Friday Mass, we’d wear white gloves,” said Lesley Wooler, who came to Prout after ninth grade at Narragansett Elementary.
“It was either South Kingstown High School or boarding school,” up until then, she said, because Narragansett didn’t have its own high school until 1975.
“It was a happy alternative.”
Prout opened with a freshman and sophomore class that year, but construction continued around them in the school that was to accommodate 450 girls. The students started out using four finished classrooms and were without a chapel at first, but for some students, the setting itself was spiritual.
“It was very isolated and gorgeous,” said Helen Mulholland Pernicone of South Kingstown, who came to Prout from Narragansett.
“I was dying to go there,” said Pernicone, now a fifth-grade teacher at Peace Dale Elementary School. “I liked the whole idea of wearing a uniform and going to a Catholic school.
“It was like heaven to us. Our own little safe haven.”
According to a 25th anniversary booklet kept by Assistant Principal Louise R. Pearson, which documents the school history, the grounds were part of an estate called “Shepherd’s Run” originally owned by Shepherd Hazard of Peace Dale. It passed down through the Sturgis family, then was sold to the Cherry family of Cherry and Webb. In 1959, that family sold the 212-acre estate, with a 19-room stone chateau, to the Sisters of the Cross and Passion. It became the main building to a convent where the Sisters of the Cross and Passion lived and built a novitiate for the training of others.
Around the same time, the Bishop of the Diocese of Providence, Russell J. McVinney, expressed an interest in the project and offered some financial support, but several years passed before it would become a diocesan school.
The school was named for Elizabeth Prout, foundress of the order in England.
According to Sister Lillian Dempsey, C.P., a former principal who participated in the weekend event, the Sisters of the Cross and Passion were invited, in 1924, by then-Bishop of Providence William A. Hickey to open a hostel for nurses in Providence, but the idea didn’t work, and the early sisters ended up staying in Rhode Island and staffing The Assumption School.
It was the dream, she said, of Sister Concepta White to establish a school for girls here, and so she asked her own younger sister, Sister Dolores White, still in Ireland and close to retirement, to come to Rhode Island and help her dream unfold. The Sisters built the school for girls, and it remained girls-only until the fall of 1986, when the first four boys arrived and the Prout Memorial High School for Girls sign came down.
“I have to admit, I didn’t want to go to Prout because it was all girls,” said Mary-Jo Nolan, a member of the first graduating class. Her last name now is Jackson, but she has the Peace Dale Dinonsie family in her lineage, and she did indeed attend Prout despite the lack of boys.
The girls were graded on personal grooming and learned to set a proper dinner table, along with the academic subjects taught by the Sisters.
“There were a lot of rules about the length of our skirts and the shoes worn inside and others outside,” recalled Lynne Ryan Webster of Narragansett.
“I received a very fine education there that I will always treasure,” said Zambuco, of Warwick, a Rhode Island Teacher of the Year who also won a Presidential Award for Excellence in Math and Science.
Prout Principal Gary R. Delneo spoke Sunday of the school’s tremendous growth from the days of the first class of 48, with almost half of the remaining 44 attending the reunion.
“Thank you to the Class of 1969 for letting us stand on your shoulders, and for loving the school enough to return this morning,” he said.
The women gathered just outside the front door, where a copper beech tree had been planted, arranged by Wooler, who surrounded it with other plants, flowering shrubs and a plaque in memory of their first headmistress, Sister Dolores White, and their four deceased classmates.
“I believe the garden truly represents our class, and it will continue to grow every year just as our friendships continue to grow,” said Wooler.
Msgr. John C. Halloran, pastor emeritus of St. Thomas More Church in Narragansett, who officiated at Sunday’s reunion Mass, blessed the garden, and the group, saying: “Bless those who seek to learn, that the spirit of God continues to grant you wisdom.”
A few tears emerged from those first graduates as they stood quiet in the moment, teenagers no more, pioneers forever.
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