The Homecoming parade is an annual cherished tradition in State College. It’s founded on spirit and connecting high schoolers with their community. However, there’s more to the parade than the fun. The used cardboard from the floats, the discarded candy on the road, and the surplus of light and air pollution all affect the community.
The parade is just one day a year, but the environment lasts forever. State High needs to maintain an environmental perspective for this event that has such a vast impact..
“Even though it’s for just a brief moment in time that we’re having the parade, some of the trash, some of the stuff that’s left in the surrounding neighborhoods, stays there for a while,” Environmental Science teacher Kimberly Murphy said.“So, what I would say is it’s a short blip, but we want to make sure that our footprint is as little as possible.”
The footprint can be anything from candy wrappers to the congestion of vehicle exhaust. As for the material waste, student floats are typically made from materials like cardboard, wood, and paint.
Two dumpsters located behind the high school, where the parade started and ended, were used so people could throw their discarded building materials away instead of leaving them stranded in the parking lot.
The planning process for an event as large as homecoming begins in May, going through the Bourgh, the commissioner, the police department, and the administration from State High.
Assistant Principal Ryan Walsh works closely with School Resource Officer John Aston to “go through all the questions they have and all the requirements.” The parade route is chosen primarily based on the length. “Safety is the number one consideration,” Walsh said.
Measures are put in place to decrease the amount of waste left over, such as the dumpsters and volunteers who help to pick up trash along the route. “We also send out our own ground crew to make sure they take a ride through the parade route to make sure there’s nothing big in there in the morning,” Walsh said. But the beforehand of waste limitation is just as important as the after.
The effects of the homecoming parade are small, but over time they build up. “I would say they’re not significant in terms of the long-term environmental health of the neighborhood,” Murphy said. “But I would say that being conscious about our footprint and about the additional traffic and pollution that we’re contributing makes everybody think about their other impacts, whether it’s at the parade or whether it’s in their everyday life.”
It comes down to being mindful of our environmental footprint—the trash we leave, the traffic we create, and the overarching consequences of our actions, no matter how small. State High needs to be mindful of our environmental impact. As Murphy puts it: “Each action we take contributes to a collective impact on the environment.”
