Vancouver school’s Pride Parade shares love, acceptance

Love was on display in East Vancouver Thursday, where dozens of students from Strathcona Elementary took to the streets in their very own Pride Parade. Dressed in rainbow colours, children walked the blocks around the school on Pender Street in support of inclusion. Waving and smiling at crowds of parents and other neighbours, the children carried homemade signs and costumes.

Meris Goodfellow’s daughter (right) walks with friends at Strathcona Elementary School’s Pride Parade in East Vancouver Thursday. (Submitted by Meris Goodfellow) “We were so excited. The entire school got all done up in their rainbows.

It was rainbow day for the kindergarten class. There were sparkles, there was music, there were people on bikes, there was a small float,” recalled Meris Goodfellow, whose five-year-old daughter took part in the parade. Videos of the parade have been posted on social media, some receiving thousands of views and likes.

One video posted to TikTok has generated a number of supportive comments, with one person saying whoever came up with the idea “deserves a raise. ” @overdoseprevenjuls I’m staying in East Van rn and the local elementary schools hosted a little #prideparade ♬ Born This Way – Lady Gaga “My heart was bursting,” Goodfellow said of how she felt at the parade. “Our family, we’re all queer-identified adults in the family as well as our peripheral caregivers and our community is largely a queer community, within the school, within the neighbourhood, and within my co-op, which is just adjacent to the school.

“It felt like, as a community, we are coming together and seeing the joy and seeing the acceptance and support throughout the entire student body. Even right now I have a little bit of shivers just feeling how good that feels,” she continued. Goodfellow recalls being a young child in a time when she says queer kids and adults struggled to be themselves because of intolerance.

She says Thursday’s event represented progress. “We’ve come a really long way. It brings tears to my eye, I get a little bit misty thinking about it,” Goodfellow added.

June to September marks Pride season across Canada. The term is used to refer to the wide range of events that take place through the summer to celebrate 2SLGBTQ+ communities. In Vancouver, Pride Week is marked at the end of July.

This year marks the 44th anniversary of the Vancouver Pride parade, which will be held on Sunday, July 31. Open Gallery11 items Goodfellow says taking part in such events, like the Pride Parade at Strathcona Elementary, is about “sharing acceptance, tolerance, and integration of people from all walks of life. ” “It’s a celebration of coming out and coming out of oppression and it gives us a joyful opportunity to speak about what wrongs were done in the past, how we’re moving towards tolerance, how there are places in the world where there’s still a lot of work to be done,” she explained.

She notes while her kid’s school event got a lot of support from the community, she’s heard of other schools that did the same thing and got pushback. That, Goodfellow says, shows there’s still work to do, though she admits Vancouver is “very tolerant. ”.