BH-BL Flag Day Parade Rules & Regulations
The BH-BL Flag Day Parade is brought to you by the BH-BL Business and Professional Association (BPA) and a number of local businesses. The BPA’s Parade Steering Committee & other volunteers have put many hours into preparations to make this a safe and happy event. This event involves nearly 2,000 marchers and thousands of more spectators, so everyone’s cooperation is needed to prevent safety problems. Each group or business wanting to march in the parade must read the rules below and complete the following entry form on behalf of their group or business. We strongly suggest you also make copies of these rules for all your marchers to read.
- Your submission of this entry form indicates that you and the members of your group agree to abide by the following rules. The Parade Steering Committee reserves the right to deny the participation in the following year’s parade of any group that does not obey the safety rules listed below.
- There is no rain date for the parade. In the very unlikely event, the weather is so severe the parade cannot be safely held, the entire event will be canceled by the BPA president and announced at www.bhblbpa.com and at www.facebook.com/BHBLFlagDayParade on the day of the parade. (Cancellation of the parade has only happened once.) In the more likely scenario that the forecast includes some rain, each group must use its own judgment about participating. (For BH-BL school groups marching in the parade, Superintendent McGrath will make the decision about your participation if the weather is a question.)
- The parade must keep moving forward at all times. ALL groups need to move slowly & continuously forward at a speed that allows only 20 – 30 feet between your group and the group in front of you. No big gaps between parade entries, please!
- No parade entry may be more than 13 feet high. Please be aware of the height of your entry and remember that there are some low wires across the road on the parade route. If you knock down a wire, it will be your liability, not that of the BH-BL Business & Professional Association.
- This entire evening is a family event with many small children in attendance. Please do not do anything that might be considered dangerous or might set a bad example for the children of our community.
- You are welcome to hand out candy or other trinkets to the crowd along the parade route, but we do mean to HAND it out. There can be no throwing of candy from floats or vehicles because children darting into the roadway to catch thrown items is a serious safety risk every year. If you plan to hand out candy, be sure to come with marchers who can walk along each side of your vehicle and hand it out.
- Do not hand out freeze pops. They make a sticky mess on the roadway.
- If your entry includes animals, you must also bring a person on “pooper scooper” patrol.
- Use the Shuttle Buses! Marchers walking back along Route 50 while the parade is underway are a problem because they block the view of spectators. Please help us prevent this by having your group use the shuttle buses at the parade’s end. These are school buses leaving TCAR (across from County Acres) every 10 – 15 minutes specifically to carry marchers of all ages back to the high school via Kingsbury & Kingsley Roads.
- Timing: Early in the week of the parade, you will be notified where the marchers from your group should go to line up (either in the High School front parking lot or the former Burnt Hills Lanes parking lot). Please let all marchers know in advance that they should plan to arrive before 6:30 pm on June 8.