With ceremonies canceled, yard signs celebrate graduates.
With proms and ceremonies canceled, parents turn to their front lawns for the class of 2020
By mid-April, Cynthia Spencer-Kern was used to the letdowns.
Her senior year at Cypress Falls High School was put on pause and then ended abruptly. Her prom and graduation were pushed back time and time again, and she wonders now if they will happen at all. She feels like she is not succeeding in final weeks of school because, in her mind, teachers are giving the 12th graders a pass amid the shutdown caused by the new coronavirus pandemic.
So, when she and her mother drove to the school to pick up a celebratory yard sign to mark the end of her high school days, she was surprised to see dozens of her teachers cheering and yelling well wishes from the trunks of their cars. She said afterward that she smiled for the entire 10 minutes it took them to snake through the line of cars at the CyFalls parking lot.
“It made me feel that I was remembered,” Cynthia said. “They took the time to make those things and help us remember that we’re not forgotten.”
With in-person rites of high school passage suspended due to the pandemic, schools and families have turned to celebrating the class of 2020’s accomplishments in other ways. One increasingly popular way is popping up on front lawns and in windows across greater Houston.
Some are elaborate affairs, with balloons, banners, giant photos of smiling teenagers and knee-high letters spelling out “conGRAD
ulations!” Others are simpler, consisting of single plastic signs emblazoned with school logos and the year. Others encourage joggers to yell well wishes or drivers to hit the horn as they pass.
“Honk for Tenney School Class of 2020,” one sign read in front of a two-story beige bungalow in the Heights. “Longest skip day ever!”
The signs are more than just a morale boost for seniors stuck at home. They are proving to be a lifeline for some local print shops and photographers.
Business had been down by about 50 percent at Extreme Vinyl Supply in Humble, said Judy Shuttlesworth, who owns the store with her husband Gerry. After a friend asked if she could make a sign to honor her senior, Shuttleworth decided to make several templates for nearby schools and market them on Facebook.
Now, about 90 percent of her business is coming from sign orders for graduating seniors, with calls coming in from across northeast Houston and as far away as Virginia.
Channelview photographer Juan DeLeon has partnered with a local print shop to make customized senior yard signs for $30 each.
Normally at this time of year, DeLeon would be taking photos of Houston Baptist University’s sports teams or the Rice University women’s basketball team. With those games canceled, most of his work is designing signs and taking senior portraits.
“If I weren’t doing the senior portraits and signs, I probably wouldn’t get a paycheck until September,” DeLeon said.
His subject this past Tuesday was Kory Early, a senior at Baytown Christian Academy.
DeLeon had rigged a sprinkler to make the athletes look like they are playing in the pouring rain, and the finished products look more like advertisements for Gatorade than high school keepsakes.
DeLeon already had taken several photos during an earlier session with Early, including one of the senior in a small bass boat, holding a fish he had just caught, his smile hidden beneath a cornflower blue mask and posing next to a cache of cleaning products and hand sanitizer.
His mother, Sherry, wanted to do more to celebrate his high school finale, so she ordered some yard signs.
“It’s very hard as a parent because you think about how, for my older son and for ourselves, too, how we looked forward to that,” Early said. “It’s the finale of your high school years. You work all your life to get there, and then for it to not happen, it is a big disappointment.”
In Galena Park ISD, Renée Cantu has had to be comforted by her senior, 18-year-old Nicolas. It’s okay, he tells her, I’m going to college, and that was the whole point. You’ll be able to watch me graduate then.
“He knows I’m an emotional wreck,” Cantu said.
Rather than spend another day wallowing, Cantu and her daughter Mia snuck around several weekends ago creating a huge display out front for Nicolas. She hung his cap and gown by the front door, pinned lines of photos on a wall leading to the entrance, wrapped boxes in red tissue paper and stuck gold “2020” letters across the side. She had a chesthigh photograph of Nicolas holding his saxophone printed, hung an 8-foot congratulations banner from two pine trees in the front yard, tied balloons down with fishing line and laid Christmas lights beneath the whole thing.
When she coaxed Nicolas out of his room to look at it, he walked around the front yard in a stupor.
He stopped when he got to the front of the house and saw the entire setup.
“It was just — it’s probably the most normal thing that’s happened to me in a while,” Nicolas said. “Just the feeling of security and normal-ness made me emotional, that everything was going to go back to normal soon.”
Back at Cypress Falls High, soap bubbles floated up around the car as senior Natalie Gallo and her mother rolled in to pick up her sign.
She could not stop smiling until she saw her favorite teacher, Ms. Hansen, and her guidance counselor parked next to each other near the end of the line. She could hardly see the rest of the line through her tears after that.
“It was like an emotional bomb,” Natalie said. “I just wanted to get out of my car and hug them.”