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NORWALK, Conn. — Norwalk.DailyVoice.com accepts signed, original letters to the editor. Letters may be emailed to letters@dailyvoice.com.
To the Editor,
I have been the president of the Norwalk High School Marching Band for the past two years. Let me explain the issues that most of the public as well as reporters do not understand. BAND is a MANDATORY credited course (for students who are studying music) as part of the Board of Education curriculum. With that being said, let me enlighten everyone who may not know:
- BAND is a credited course and it is GRADED!
- It costs $450,000 per year to run the Norwalk High School Marching Band.
- ONLY $20,000 comes from the BOE to cover buses for band trips. This does not even cover half of our cost – our buses cost $45,000 per year.
- We the parents raise every other penny to cover SCHOOL custodians, uniforms, props, most instruments. (It costs the band, NOT THE SCHOOLS, to replace our drums. We buy used ones – last year it cost US $11,000.
- Each student pays roughly $1,000 per year to participate in Marching (A SCHOOL GRADED COURSE), not to mention JAZZ, WINTER GUARD, WINTER PERCUSSION and SCHOOL MUSICALS.
To say our kids need to pay to play is completely ridiculous and absurd! We already do pay a tremendous amount of money.
As a side note at Norwalk High, we have honors math and honors history! Only one student this year went on to be an educator in the field of math and history. This year seven of our 24 seniors are going to college for music education. My daughter is one of them. It saddens me to find so many people who think they know what they are talking about voicing uneducated opinions, which in fact are not only incorrect, but they minimize the impact that music has in our schools.
Comments (3)
Chuck raises some excellent points and I applaud the band parents at Norwalk High. That program is successful because of the combined efforts of the kids and their parents. Perhaps his most relevant point However, was his reference to uninformed and emotional opinions by many parents during what has been a very upsetting budgeting process. Health insurance and special education costs are cannibalizing our public education system and have been for years. I encourage newer elementary parents in the system to look at the bigger picture facing public education. It goes beyond the walls of your particular elementary school and Norwalk. As an 'older' parent who has moved through the system. It's a 13 year journey.
Bryan you might like to know that the correlation between musicians and computer programmers is extremely high, and sorry I don't have a statistic to post here. All arts education is important, and fundamental to any career in any industry.
Those are some excellent points you make. No one should ever accuse these band kids of not working hard. I think that is why you'll find so many of us who don't even have kids in band in support of your efforts. It is truely something for Norwalk to be proud of.
Here, though, is where we disagree. Do a search on monster.com for "music teachers" vs. "math teachers". The search returns 29 jobs for music and 85 for math. Who do you think will be better off when it comes to finding work some day? Don't get me wrong, music is wonderful but it is an elective and everyone should follow their dreams. But at the same time we have to deal with reality and do more to encourage children on hard academics. Not to say those would be music educators don't switch majors as most do, but are they going to be better off with marketable skills or crowded out by too much competition?
With first hand knowledge on the subject, I can tell you that if we were producing more math majors out of universities we would not have the same unemployment epidemic here and would not have to give visas to so many foreign workers. Some like to say it is a cost savings measure, but it is really due to lack of skilled math/science/computer graduates.
I can't say if 24 music education majors is too many, but certainly only 1 math major is too few. And that math major will have a much easier time getting work after college.