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03/06/2024 08:30 AMThe Greater New Haven St. Patrick’s Day Parade Committee has crowned East Haven’s Sarah Parlato as this year’s parade queen. The event will take place along Chapel Street in New Haven on Sunday, March 10 and, with fingers crossed for good weather, Sarah is really excited to be representing her community.
“It’s gonna be a great day,” she says.
As a proud Irish American, Sarah is a member of the New Haven Gaelic Football and Hurling Club, which selected her to be the queen for this year’s parade in her first time running for the role. Sarah says it was a “whole day process” of choosing the queen of the parade, starting off with a club breakfast, interviews with the judges on what it means to be the parade queen, and then appearances onstage in the regalia of the role.
“We got to go onstage, and we answered three questions onstage, only one of them we knew beforehand, which was a little nerve-wracking,” says Sarah. “After that, the judges got together, and they decided right there. So, we found out onstage who was selected as the queen, and then [Emily Burke] was my honor attendant.”
Sarah says she was “absolutely shocked” to learn of her selection as this year’s parade queen.
“When they announced my name, my jaw dropped, but once the shock wore off, I was so excited. My honor attendant Emily is such a sweetheart. We got to bond a little bit throughout the day,” Sarah says. “I was really excited to be a representative for my community, the Irish American community.”
The St. Patrick’s Day Parade and the meaning of the holiday is a deeply familial event for Sarah. She remembers attending the parade every single year when she was very young, seeing her grandfather lead the kilt-wearing bagpipe troupe of the Emerald Society.
Sarah is of mostly Irish heritage, with the majority of her ancestors hailing from the counties of Tipperary, Kildare, and Laois. Sarah got to visit her ancestral homeland during her academic career at Northeastern University, spending four months at University College Dublin.
“I don't know how much of an opportunity it was because I was only 18, but they took us around the entire country,” Sarah says. “We went on trips almost every weekend. We went to Northern Ireland, we went to Galway, we went to the southern island, around the city in Dublin. It was really an incredible experience.”
As the parade queen, Sarah is “kind of gonna be everywhere,” from the mass at St. Mary’s Church to meeting with the other Irish American clubs of New Haven to conversing with the companies sponsoring the event.
“We're gonna be running around all day,” she says. “I'm trying to pick out what shoes I'm going to wear, make sure it's gonna be warm enough. I’m crossing my fingers for good weather, but I'm really excited.”
Following her graduation from Northeastern, Sarah returned to live and work in East Haven, always around young children. She was previously a teacher at Old Stone Church’s preschool and is now the building secretary at the Overbrook Early Learning Center.
Sarah has been involved in her community and connecting with her fellow Easties throughout her life. She garnered many volunteer service hours as a result of being in classrooms and participating in extracurricular activities while growing up. Today, Sarah can be found volunteering at the East Haven Food Pantry, continuing her work in fighting food insecurity that she also does at Overbrook through its Family Resource Center.
Sarah credits her big and closely connected family for instilling in her values of altruism and community. Sarah not only recognizes her own family heritage, but also the “incredible amount of diversity” in East Haven through her work in the school system.
“I would say about half of our students are actually Spanish speaking. We have that older wave of Italian and Irish immigrants that came here. Right now, we have a number of people from Ecuador, from Colombia, from Puerto Rico,” she says. “I have people [at Overbrook] from China, Zambia, a family came from Russia. We have so much culture and history here.”
The Greater New Haven St. Patrick’s Day Parade will take place on Sunday, March 10 from 1:30 to 4 p.m. There will be a live broadcast by WTNH starting at 2 p.m.