I'm back and ready to go from my daughters college graduation, Woo Hoo!
I left off last time as we had made a rather large emotional plea to the school board and administration to not cut the music program. It was then we knew we had to dig deeper and learn how to deal with this from the administrator level.
After the meeting, a dozen of us concerned parents hung around for awhile and talked about what we did and reflected about if we thought we had done anything to change their minds. We came to the decision rather quickly that we had not changed their minds but did give them a good show. A game plan to learn the language they used at us and somehow see if we could turn that to our favor is where we went.
A couples days went by and a bunch of email sharing, we started to dig into what the real root of the problem could be. Researching curriculum, public school finance, FTE's, which stands for Full Time Equivalent and is the measure of a teachers status of employment, what determinations are made at budgeting time and who sets those perimeters were just a few areas we started to look at. As we continued, one of the members came across a consultant that helped music programs across the country that would come in and help with statistics and analyze your programs strengths and weaknesses. We made note about how many consultants the district hires for various reasons, what the heck, maybe that is just what we needed. We called and he turned out to be a local guy that had time to come and help us. We pooled together some booster funds as well as had a few music stores chip in for his fee and hired John the consultant.
The next week was an amazing eye opening experience like no other. John came in and made things happen. John and I met with the superintendent, business manager, and briefly with the curriculum director to get statistics and why they felt the cuts to the program were necessary. Other parents were talking to the music teachers and asking them to all meet at once to go over the program with John.
We actually got every music teacher from the district to meet with John and talk about the program. This was an interesting exercise and one that if I had my way would be done with some frequency to build the district music team. Ideas were exchanged, problems with the curriculum were discovered, FTE distribution amongst the teachers could perhaps be used better and so on. John also got all the stats of the program together for the last 6 - 7 years or so as to what the enrollment figures have been. John focused on numbers, enrollment, curriculum, and that kind of stuff much more than our emotional push of the week before and we were all feeling a bit better about our approach.
With the Report being typed up from John, we were all giddy and excited to go in front of the school board at a special morning session they arranged for us. We had recommendations for the program and really cool ways to maybe better run the program and stay within budget perimeters. What could go wrong, this was going to be GREAT! Hold on and I promise to be back soon for the next installment of save your music!
Peace Out,
Rich
Friday, May 17, 2013
Monday, May 6, 2013
You can't cut music!
Boy o boy! Now I've done it. I have been sorting information and deciding how to write this and I am just going to start at the root, the middle school experience. But first, one quick set up so you know the size of the district.
The school district I belong to is a smaller district that contains 6 elementary schools grades 1 -4, 2 middle schools grades 5 - 8, and 1 high school grades 9 - 12. The high school enrollment is approximately 1400 students. The district has a superintendent, a curriculum director, and a finance director in its district administration as well as a principal at every building plus lots of others but these are the important ones.
That said, it all began for me in late February 2007 as I was working on helping with the middle school variety show we did each year. The music teachers from both choir and band showed up at practice with doom and gloom in their eyes and informed me they had just met with admin and found out that they were being cut in hours for the the next year budget cycle. At that point you think to yourself, well how can do that? The music education in the building was good and why on earth would you mess with that. I thought to myself I need to let people know about this and what better way than to start spreading the bad news quickly. I hopped onto my email as soon as I got home and fired one off to the high school director and about a dozen of my band booster friends and said: Oh NO!! Have you heard they are proposing cuts to the middle school program. I can tell you that was a tuesday afternoon and by thursday, we had successfully whipped up a bunch of parents concerned about music.
A great way to start a journey is to get a bunch of parents together and start throwing out ideas and that is what we did. We all decided that the school board needed to be told they can't just take away music from the district so we emailed, called, talked, and yelled out to all music parents to show up at the next school board meetiing wearing red shirts to support music. At the meeting, someone handed out buttons to save the music and we had such a good turnout that the meeting was moved to the cafeteria,
It was then that district leadership spoke out and informed us that due to decreasing enrollment, unfunded mandates, as well as our test scores were not where they needed to be which threatened more federal dollars because we were not up to No Child Left Behind (NCLB) standards. Actions were being taken to keep down classroom sizes and put more effort into core curriculum. I can still remember looking around at everyone with a puzzled look thinking, but what about the positive effects of music? They proceeded to give us a special board listening session the next week for parents to talk to them about the music program.
Again at the listening session, we moved to the auditorium due to the amount of parents and we proceeded to explain to the school board that music has positive effects on the brain. Children in music outscore most others in school. Band, choir, and orchestra can have large class sizes which help maintain lower class sizes elsewhere. We all thought we did a pretty good job coming up with great reasons not to cut the program. Then we started to let parents come up and speak to the board which went on for about an hour and a half. Parents, some in tears, explaining that music was their child's outlet and how proud they were to be in music.
After all that, the school board said Thank You, we will take your thoughts into consideration.
What? That was it? We took them for an emotion packed 2 hour ride and they just said Thank You?
It was then that a core group of about 12 parents from band, choir, and orchestra decided that this was a game of wits, not emotion and in my next post I will share the next steps we took to saving music in our district.
Back soon!
Rich
The school district I belong to is a smaller district that contains 6 elementary schools grades 1 -4, 2 middle schools grades 5 - 8, and 1 high school grades 9 - 12. The high school enrollment is approximately 1400 students. The district has a superintendent, a curriculum director, and a finance director in its district administration as well as a principal at every building plus lots of others but these are the important ones.
That said, it all began for me in late February 2007 as I was working on helping with the middle school variety show we did each year. The music teachers from both choir and band showed up at practice with doom and gloom in their eyes and informed me they had just met with admin and found out that they were being cut in hours for the the next year budget cycle. At that point you think to yourself, well how can do that? The music education in the building was good and why on earth would you mess with that. I thought to myself I need to let people know about this and what better way than to start spreading the bad news quickly. I hopped onto my email as soon as I got home and fired one off to the high school director and about a dozen of my band booster friends and said: Oh NO!! Have you heard they are proposing cuts to the middle school program. I can tell you that was a tuesday afternoon and by thursday, we had successfully whipped up a bunch of parents concerned about music.
A great way to start a journey is to get a bunch of parents together and start throwing out ideas and that is what we did. We all decided that the school board needed to be told they can't just take away music from the district so we emailed, called, talked, and yelled out to all music parents to show up at the next school board meetiing wearing red shirts to support music. At the meeting, someone handed out buttons to save the music and we had such a good turnout that the meeting was moved to the cafeteria,
It was then that district leadership spoke out and informed us that due to decreasing enrollment, unfunded mandates, as well as our test scores were not where they needed to be which threatened more federal dollars because we were not up to No Child Left Behind (NCLB) standards. Actions were being taken to keep down classroom sizes and put more effort into core curriculum. I can still remember looking around at everyone with a puzzled look thinking, but what about the positive effects of music? They proceeded to give us a special board listening session the next week for parents to talk to them about the music program.
Again at the listening session, we moved to the auditorium due to the amount of parents and we proceeded to explain to the school board that music has positive effects on the brain. Children in music outscore most others in school. Band, choir, and orchestra can have large class sizes which help maintain lower class sizes elsewhere. We all thought we did a pretty good job coming up with great reasons not to cut the program. Then we started to let parents come up and speak to the board which went on for about an hour and a half. Parents, some in tears, explaining that music was their child's outlet and how proud they were to be in music.
After all that, the school board said Thank You, we will take your thoughts into consideration.
What? That was it? We took them for an emotion packed 2 hour ride and they just said Thank You?
It was then that a core group of about 12 parents from band, choir, and orchestra decided that this was a game of wits, not emotion and in my next post I will share the next steps we took to saving music in our district.
Back soon!
Rich
Monday, April 29, 2013
My name is Rich Post and I have experience to share about saving music in public schools. A quick background on what I have done to provide credibility to my story.
I have 3 kids that all went through the public education system and they all played in the band. The high school also supported a summer marching band program for the students and that worked well to strengthen an engaged parent booster club because the club was set up to run the details of the summer program. As I entered the program in 2005 when my daughter surprised me and signed up for summer marching band, I began to take notice of the program due what I saw was a really well done program for kids to learn important life skills such as leadership, discipline, pride, respect, and team building just to list a few. I also noticed a shrinking music program which is so common these days as the struggle for funding public education dollars is being squeezed. Being the good dad that I am, I naturally threw myself into the mix and volunteered to help run the boosters as its vice president in 2007. About half way through that year, another sizable cut to the middle school music program was announced and it was a catalyst for music parents to stand up and take note of the cuts and begin to think about how we could lobby to minimize the cuts. More specifics on that later, but suffice it to say that the next several years were filled with analyzing and strategizing ways to hold on to performing arts for the kids. Over the series of this blog, I will go into detail of the many different ways we acted to be ready when players at the district level changed to jump the opportunity to make improvements for fine arts.
My last child graduated last year in 2012 and the legacy our boosters left behind will benefit many kids well into the future in our district, I hope...
Please stay tuned as I will add chapters to this blog to discuss my experience and hopefully help other music parent groups make decisions about saving their programs.
See Ya!
Rich
I have 3 kids that all went through the public education system and they all played in the band. The high school also supported a summer marching band program for the students and that worked well to strengthen an engaged parent booster club because the club was set up to run the details of the summer program. As I entered the program in 2005 when my daughter surprised me and signed up for summer marching band, I began to take notice of the program due what I saw was a really well done program for kids to learn important life skills such as leadership, discipline, pride, respect, and team building just to list a few. I also noticed a shrinking music program which is so common these days as the struggle for funding public education dollars is being squeezed. Being the good dad that I am, I naturally threw myself into the mix and volunteered to help run the boosters as its vice president in 2007. About half way through that year, another sizable cut to the middle school music program was announced and it was a catalyst for music parents to stand up and take note of the cuts and begin to think about how we could lobby to minimize the cuts. More specifics on that later, but suffice it to say that the next several years were filled with analyzing and strategizing ways to hold on to performing arts for the kids. Over the series of this blog, I will go into detail of the many different ways we acted to be ready when players at the district level changed to jump the opportunity to make improvements for fine arts.
My last child graduated last year in 2012 and the legacy our boosters left behind will benefit many kids well into the future in our district, I hope...
Please stay tuned as I will add chapters to this blog to discuss my experience and hopefully help other music parent groups make decisions about saving their programs.
See Ya!
Rich
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