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PHOTO BY CLARE JENSEN

DAFFODIL FLOAT. Stadium students Genesis Cabrera, Luke Knaecshaur and Destinee Richardson (left to right) help cover Tacoma’s first daffodil parade float in two years with 2,000 daffodils April 11. The float (designed by Stadium’s environmental club) insured that Tacoma students would be eligible to participate in daffodil festivities after being put on probation the year before.

Stadium helps keep Tacoma afloat

By Clare Jensen

For the past 75 years, hundreds of Tacoma teens have competed for Daffodil Festival royalty, marched along the Daffodil Parade route playing in time with band-mates and stood on the sidewalks to see classmates poking out among the sea of yellow flowers.

Tacoma almost lost that opportunity to engage its youth in this beloved annual event.

The city has not had a float in the parade for the past two years. Last year, the Daffodil Festival committee put Tacoma on probation; if it did not come up with a float this year, the largest participating city on the parade route would be booted out all together.

That means no Tacoma princesses, no Tacoma marching bands, no daffodil scholarships. All Tacoma schools would be banned from participating in any of the festivities.

What might have created activism among members of the Tacoma community, who hold soft spots in their hearts for the Puget Sound tradition did not quite have that effect.

It took a Tacoma teacher, an Oregon native who had never even been to a Daffodil Parade, to step up to the plate and more or less save Tacoma’s access to the springtime activities.

Donna Dell, American sign language instructor at Stadium High School, moved to Tacoma seven years ago. She never actually attended a parade, but she knew how important it was to many of her students.

So as advisor to the school’s environmental club, she tasked her students to create a float.

The club received $250 from private donors and $200 from Tacoma Public Schools (TPS), which gave them a slim $450 total to work with. Because each float must include at least 2,000 daffodils at $75 per thousand, meeting the minimum flower requirement left the group with a meager $300 for wood, paint, streamers, paper, fuel and the float frame.

 “We have the bare bones,” Dell said, who added her design team had to go back to the drawing board a total of eight times to scale back their creative (and expensive) ideas.

According to Ron Simchen, president of the board of the Daffodil Festival, the average small-sized float costs anywhere from $25,000 - $40,000.

The Fife-Milton community float showcased double the minimum daffodil requirement. The Puyallup Tribe’s float (which placed second in the float rankings) totaled $150,000 daffodils.

While the float itself was not the reason Dell and her students got involved in the project, it may surprise neighboring communities that a city with nearly 200,000 residents could pool less than $500 for the area tradition.

“This shouldn’t be the school’s responsibility – it should be the whole community’s,” said sophomore Phoebe Bricker, who volunteered to decorate the float April 11. Bricker was able to march with her Reserve Officer Training Corps brigade this year because of the float.

Luke Knaecshaur, a Stadium junior who also helped decorate the float before the parade, saw it as a way to help keep his fellow Tacoma students on the parade route for another year. “We (TPS) would have been out of the whole thing (festival) if we didn’t do this.”

The Tacoma float, built by members of the Stadium community, may have not won any awards April 12, but T-Town princesses, bands and cadets were able march in the daffi-filled streets like always.

“I only did this because of the students who enjoy participating,” Dell said. “It’s a tradition, and there’s so many people telling me how great it is that we’re keeping this alive.”

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