Parents of Brea Olinda High School students rally to get banners up for seniors before graduation

How many light poles are there in your city? Do the poles have brackets that hold 10-foot banners or 3-foot banners? And if you’re not allowed to hang two banners on light poles directly across from each other, how many banners can you fit on one street?

These were some of the basic questions parents Stephanie Wiemann and Michelle Groudas had to answer in order to apply for permits to hang celebratory banners recognizing Brea Olinda High School’s 403 graduating seniors in Brea.

When the COVID-19 pandemic sent their high schoolers home, and it became clear that this year’s seniors would not get a regular graduation ceremony, parents from Brea Olinda started tossing around alternate ideas in a Facebook group.

“We just kept this big long running list,” said Pam Valenti, a math teacher at the school who has a daughter graduating this year.

She’s also Brea Olinda’s activities director, which means she’s in charge of events like prom, rallies, blood drives and graduation.

“We thought, ‘What things can we make work here, and what things are just beyond the scope of what we’re capable of doing right now?” she said, of the school.

Wiemann and Groudas, whose sons used to play in Little League together, really wanted to put up banners around the city for the students. They were initially let down when the school district wasn’t interested in moving forward.

Valenti, who has been working at Brea Olinda for 30 years, explained that the district is not only responsible for the senior class, but they’re also busy figuring out regulations and online curriculum for students from preschool through high school.

But even though the school wasn’t available to help, she said they gave the parents their blessing to pursue the project themselves.

It was a group effort, filled with unexpected obstacles. Neither of them had ever worked with the city before. But with each roadblock, more parents stepped up to help.

Wiemann and Groudas quickly decided creating 403 banners wasn’t practical, so they got estimates for the cost of 40 banners with 10 names each, five on each side.

They raised $4,500 from their GoFundMe campaign in 27 hours.

“I’m a kick-down-doors get-it-done type of person,” said Wiemann, a former gymnastics coach and current stay-at-home mom. “But Michelle’s the one who does the technical side, the paperwork and the math.”

Groudas, a mammography technologist, mapped out a diagram of where they wanted each banner to go.

When they couldn’t find an affordable sign-installation company, they called up Jason Clements, an alumnus of Brea Olinda High School who also has a son graduating this year.

He is the executive vice president of the Brea-based KC Communications, where he’s made a lot of local connections in the last 35 years.

Clements called up one of his clients at Power Plus, an Anaheim-based power company that doesn’t usually install banners. But they had the necessary equipment, including bucket lifts, as well as the required $2-million insurance policy. More importantly, they offered to work within their budget.

“It was the first time we’ve ever done something like this before,” said Power Plus CEO Steve Bray, but he said the banner project aligned with the mission of their nonprofit, the Giving University, which teaches about generosity.

Once Brea Councilwoman Cecelia Hupp, who has worked with Clements through her mortgage business, S&S Home Loans, heard about their project, she talked to the city manager, who offered to cover the cost of the city licensing fee, which was almost $1,000.

“Let’s face it, in 103 years, we’ve never not had a graduating class walk,” Hubb said, referring to the city of Brea being incorporated in 1917. “This was just such an unusual situation, and we felt it was the least the city could do to help.”

But the day before Power Plus was about to put the banners up, one of their employees was diagnosed with COVID-19. They had to shut down the company and test about 50 of their office workers for the novel coronavirus.

Wiemann remembers staring at the boxes of green and white banners in her house, feeling helpless as it got closer and closer to the graduation date.

“I started to panic,” Weiman remembered. “I thought, ‘Is it time for a backup plan?’”

Clements reminded her it took them two weeks to get the permit approved, and they didn’t have another two weeks to spare. About a week and a half later, the rest of the Power Plus employees had tested negative, the sick employee had recovered, and Bray was determined to help the Brea parents get the banners up on time.

“It was just a little delay, but it all worked out,” Groudas said.

They rented their own work-zone-safety traffic lights. The city asked Clement to print “No Parking” signs for the streets where they’d be hanging the banners.

“It was so weird as a citizen to put up my own ‘No Parking’ signs,” he said.

Power Plus employees put the banners up on June 1 and 2, just in time for the school’s drive-by graduations that took place over three days from June 2 to 4.

But not before their bucket lift broke, and they had to call for a mechanic to fix it.

“The timing was actually really nice, because they came up right as the kids were graduating,” said Jeanne Steffani, another parent of a Brea Olinda graduating senior.

The banners line three major streets, South Brea Boulevard, Birch Street and State College Boulevard, where it loops around the Brea Mall.

“It’s a good reminder to see ‘Oh yea, we played baseball with him,’ ‘We played basketball with him‘ or ‘Oh, I remember her from elementary school,’” Steffani said. “I’m sure I recognize at least one name per banner.”

Hupp said it gives her goosebumps to see all the kids’ names driving down the streets.

“So much pride,” she said. “We’ve got a lot of spirit in Brea. It’s a very close and friendly community. It’s grown since I’ve been here, but it’s still a small town and people really look out for each other.”

Steffani said that the community did right by their students.

With the help of the city’s Downtown Owners Assn., the marquee at Brea Improv Comedy Club is scrolling through all the names of the graduates. Other parents raised money for lawn signs. The school launched a “Locking Your Legacy” project, providing locks that the students could decorate and hang onto the barbed wire fence outside campus.

Locks decorated by Brea Olinda High School seniors hang on a fence outside of campus for a graduation project called “Locking In Your Legacy.”

(Photo by Ada Tseng)

At a drive-by senior breakfast, over 65 teachers lined the road leading up to the school with their cars in order to do a socially distanced version of their traditional sendoff.

And for 20 days, the school’s stadium lights turned on at 20:20 military time for 20 minutes to honor the Class of 2020. Five staffers, including Valenti, took turns manually turning the lights on and off for the symbolic gesture that could be seen from parts of the city as a soft glow in the northern hills of Brea.

The banners will be up until the end of June, and graduates have been going on hunts to find their names and take photos.

“The last few months of high school are so precious,” Clements said.

“Those are memories that you can’t ever replace,” Groudas said.

Clements said his son told him that when the seniors stopped going to school in mid-March, they had no idea that was going to be the last time they saw all their friends together.

“So this is just a small little olive branch for what’s left of their high school years,” Wiemann said. “I just want our city and our community to look like we care about our kids.”

“My son’s never going to be a high school senior again. But you know, some day, when he’s 25, he’s going to look back and remember that his mother did this.”

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