Punahou School hopes to strike up its band at inauguration festivities in Washington, D.C., for its most famous alumnus, President-elect Barack Obama.

The school is among several groups in Hawai'i and elsewhere seeking to bring a bit of aloha to the Jan. 20 inauguration parade down Pennsylvania Avenue. The coming inauguration is of special significance to those with Hawai'i connections because Obama was born in the Islands and graduated from Punahou in 1979.

Punahou Music Department head Darin Au said the school wouldn't have considered pulling a trip together at this late date if Obama weren't the man being inaugurated.

The Pearl City High School marching band also is considering a bid for a spot in the parade, but last-minute fundraising may prove difficult, said band director Chad Kamei.

The school's concert band, which includes marching band members, is committed to a March trip to Japan at a cost of $3,000 per student. Kamei figures the group would have to raise $500,000, or about $2,000 each, for the 150-member band plus the dance team and hula halau to perform in the inaugural parade.

"Everybody's tapped out. There's no way we can fund it ourselves, so we're calling around," Kamei said. "There's not a lot of time and resources are limited for everybody right now. But I'm young and stupid, so I figure we'll try it."

In previous years, the Pearl City marching band participated in the Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena, Calif., the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City, and a pre-Olympics festival in Beijing.

Kamei said he wouldn't dream of mounting this trip to Washington, D.C., except for the fact the president-elect has local roots.

"It has special interest since he is a Hawai'i-born president. It tells the kids that if you're from Hawai'i, you can do anything," he said.

Another high school band director told The Advertiser he applied to participate in the inaugural parade but didn't want to let students know about it so they wouldn't be disappointed if they weren't selected.

Other high school band directors said travel planning is done a year or two in advance, and that their programs were either recovering from recent trips or preparing for trips in 2009.

"We just went on a trip to Japan last spring and this is too close to pull off something this big," said 'Iolani band director Richard Hotoke.

The 2.5-mile inaugural parade route covers 15 blocks from the Capitol to the White House. There is no set number of parade units, but the event traditionally lasts about two hours. During the 2005 parade for George W. Bush, 57 out of 300 applicants were selected.

Because of the historic nature of Obama's election, more applicants are expected this time.

The application deadline has already been extended to 5 p.m. tomorrow, in part because of the flood of interest from groups wanting to join the celebration, the Washington Post reported. The Armed Forces Inaugural Committee, the organization in charge of collecting applications, said last week that it was receiving 10 applications an hour and had more than 400 so far, the Washington Post report said.

Manu Ikaika of Halau Ho'omau I Ka Wai Ola O Hawai'i, which has more than 80 members in Alexandria, Va., told The Advertiser that her group has applied.

"We've done the inaugural parade several times and we marched as a unit in 2001," Ikaika said. "Before that, we were in the Clinton inaugural and just in the recent one, which was President Bush's second inauguration — that's when we had the float.

"We're trying to represent the state of Hawai'i as best we can coming from the nation's capital."

Bands seeking to march in the parade must apply to the Armed Forces Inaugural Committee by tomorrow. Musicians from the armed services will evaluate the entries and pass on the applications to the Presidential Inaugural Committee, which will make the selection in late November or early December.