Elizabeth Lugo, Linda McBee, Kim Grogan, Anita Siegers, Roger Hohnstein and Valerie Campbell
This year, more than 50 volunteer band moms (and a few dads) will donate 1000 hours to create almost 500 Homecoming mums for Lake Highlands High School students. Before the Homecoming football game is whistled over October 12 and the curtain comes down on Varsity Revue the following night, these volunteers will cut thousands of yards of ribbon, tie hundreds of bells, and cut out Wildcat faces and cat paws ‘til their fingers ache.
When I visited their makeshift mum factory next to El Fenix, Valerie Campbell was bandaging a cut on her hand, one of many she’s received over six years of building mums. Her son, Conner, graduated in 2013, but she says she enjoys the time spent with other band moms and the contribution she makes to the cause. Profits are used by the band for halftime show music, uniforms, truck rentals, costume fees, buses, food, instrument repairs and scholarships for musicians who can’t afford to participate.
Students pay $37 for the starter mum, but the average kid spends $75 and some have been known to go as high as $125. The mum committee is highly organized and begins scouting out trinkets in the summer to find the best deals and keep costs low.
“It’s exciting to see the kids get into the school spirit,” says Kim Grogan, who serves as Ribbons Lieutenant and is parent to sophomore Kenzie. “It’s a little reminiscent of when I was in high school.” When I ask whether her school in Plano offered real flowers or silk mums, as LH does today, she turns to her own mom, Linda McBee, volunteering at another table.
“Real,” says McBee. “Yours were real.”
Roger Hohnstein admits, as the dad of two girls, he is sometimes surprised at what people pay for mums. On the other hand, as treasurer of the LH Area Band Club, “it’s going to a good cause,” he says.
“I’m from a small town in Nebraska and we didn’t have mums,” continues Roger, “but what I like about Lake Highlands is that it reminds me a lot of the way a community rallies around back where I’m from.”
At another table, “Queen Mum” Anita Siegers is cutting tiny costumes for miniature bears, which will sit in the center of the mums. Wranglers costumes, Highlandette outfits, and “hippie” clothes to fit the Woodstock theme chosen by students. This is Siegers’ 8th year cutting, gluing and building mums – her third chairing the project.
“I’ll probably be like Sue Garinger and Carol Barrows, band moms who come back to help even when their children are long gone from LHHS.”
Siegers says her team goes to great pains to keep things current, adapting bear costumes when Wranglers make a change to their uniform, for instance. And the biggest change, “we use text messaging to let students know when their mum is ready for pickup. It’s much better than the old days, when mums were transported back to the school and all the students picked them up at the same time.”
This old mom can give you an Amen on that one.
Woodstock bears
Trinkets
Makeshift mum factory
