with the hard work of outgoing Student Body President Tyler Romero and the obvious enthusiasm of incoming President Maria Escobar. It's also key that the change
in principals, from Susan Humphrey to David Engstrom, did not diminish administrative support. In fact, Engstrom likes to tell how his initial exposure to the exuberant
event (in his first year as assistant principal) sparked a kind of inner epiphany, so that now he never wants to leave Coronado.
But the hard part, as I wrote here last year when the city began enforcing its expensive new parade-safety requirements (thank you so much, liability lawyers!), will be to keep the momentum going. Money continues to be tight everywhere, with good causes lining up to the far horizon. The good news is that the parade is run by Coronado's Student Council, and the students who get on council invariably are the spirited types, many of whom have participated in the parade since grade school, and they would be absolutely crushed if this event were somehow denied.
In this regard, it's also worth noting that a goodly share of the parade support has come from the community. People who think Coronado is just the public high school that happens to be geographically the closest need a history lesson from some native Westsider. Coronado was deliberately established in 1970 as the Westside high school. It could easily be argued that the spirit behind that effort has never died, that it's been passed on to the children who've gone there and to their children, and so on. The school still has class-spirit competitions in the gymnasium, and you ought to hear them roar! Bottom line: in the midst of a cynical modern world, we have a parade so delightfully old-fashioned that it blew an otherwise-sane principal's mind. Go Coronado!
- K.J.