East County students create brave message

What started as an idea to keep Braden River High School students busy turned into an inspirational video for the school community.

Maureen Hudson, the Technology Student Association adviser, and her students were disappointed the national TSA competition from June 27 to July 1 in Nashville, Tenn., was canceled.

“These are kids who work on project after project, and they had no big projects or big things to work on moving forward,” Hudson said.

After speaking with Principal Sharon Scarbrough about what TSA students would be working on in the spring, Hudson decided to task 32 students with a video project.

Each student was assigned to a different portion of the video, such as making a time-lapse video of doing a chalk drawing, taking photos or collecting video of health care workers and grocery workers.

Freshman Bella Pasquale said she liked the idea as a replacement for the national event.

“It was almost like a TSA project except it wasn’t for competition,” she said.

In a week, the students were able to film their portion of the video and submit it to Pasquale, so she could edit all the clips together to Sara Bareilles’ song “Brave.”

“Even though we’re all far apart, we were able to get it together in a pretty good time,” Pasquale said.

The video ended with a message from Scarbrough and several teachers and staff members saying the school’s phrase for this year: We are BR.

Working on the video helped sophomore Liam Tvenstrup come to peace with not being able to participate in the national TSA competition. Tvenstrup has been involved in TSA since he was in sixth grade and has participated in the competition every year.

“When we were working on the video, I started to look at the fact that we have to be grateful for what we actually do have,” he said. “I have my health and my family. We’re still OK. It’s not like I don’t get to go to any of [the national competitions] ever again. I should be grateful for the two I have left.”

When Hudson saw the finished product for the first time April 22, she cried.

“At the beginning [of the project], it was more ‘let’s just get them thinking and their creative juices going and be working on a project,’ but I’ve been just so proud of what they produced all separately and yet together,” Hudson said.

Scarbrough was blown away when she saw the video. The school released the video on the district’s e-learning platform and social media platforms April 27 to keep everybody connected and feeling hopeful. The video had 1,090 views as of April 30.

“I was laughing, [and] I was crying,” Scarbrough said. “It was everything to see it. It’s powerful.”