PEParazzi & Parade Cheerleaders

PEParazzi

The Peparazzi is an organization for former cheerleaders and people who love parades. There are more than a dozen parades in Portland and the surrounding area and I attend as many as possible and help organize a couple of them.

A couple of years ago I noticed that lots of people still go to parades, but many of them seem to have forgotten all the work that the participants go through in order to be there for that brief hour or two. They stand on the sidewalk – or sit there in their lawn chairs and not a single smile softens their faces nor do their two hands come together in appreciation of the children’s costumes, the wonderful parade music, the floats, antique vehicles, horses, riders, - even the clowns, sometimes.

It struck me that we need parade cheerleaders – people like the Cavemen from Grants Pass from my youth in Brookings, Oregon or the Keystone Kops from the Gateway area in Portland. People who don’t mind being noticed doing funny things and who rev the crowd up - just like cheerleaders at sports events;

So, a group of like-minded people got together early in 2007, took on a name – PEParazzi – and got permission to be in parades but not be paraders, as such. We led people in impromptu yells, handed out cards with 10’s on them to show to parade entrants – everybody knows a 10 means you are great! – talked through stuffed animals, decorated our bicycles, and even handed out water to participants on a couple of very hot days.

We are sure we made a differance; however, there are not enough of us.

The next parade will be in late April, 2008. We want to be there en masse and ready to have fun and encourage more participation from everybody in attendance. We want more participants to smile and wave and more spectators to do the same.

As the current chief organizer who is having hip replacement surgery in September, I need some other people to step up, help get us together for the 2008 parade season and to plan on participating in parades as part of the PEParazzi.

Are you interested? E-mail me soon and we’ll set up some meeting/workshop times in early 2008..

Education as preparation for work

Education as preparation for work

As a former public high school teacher, I am very concerned at the trend to educate primarily for “higher education” ie college. The statistics do not bear out this trend as the way to educate all of our young people to be successful in life.

It is absolutely essential that public education policy makers remember the primary responsibility of the schooling they are supporting – education towards livelihood generation.

Some students do have the desire and funds to go directly from high school to college; others realize in the 9^th grade or so that their older friends and acquaintances who went through the school system are not able to get legal, fulfilling work with the education they received in high school, so they check out.

How can the education system change this destructive pattern? By providing job skills for all, of course, and that means going back to vocational training as an important, valid part of the middle school and high school curriculum. Even most of the young people who go on to college will have to earn part of their living while they are taking classes. Every student should have basic skills that allow him or her to qualify to work at something legal in our society upon graduation – and can be enticed to want to graduate for that very reason.

The lame excuse that vocational education is too expensive because the class size has to be small arises from the value judgment that college-bound students are worth more over time than the clerks, laborers, plumbing and electrical apprentices, carpenters, metal and woodworkers that truly keep our society’s underpinnings in order. My premise is that no young person is worth less education than it takes to prepare him or her to be able to earn a living immediately after high school and preferably in a field that competent guidance counselors have identified as suiting their capacities.

Let’s start a conversation about this…