Music in the Schools
Sharing the Joy Of Music
We started off this fall with wonderful news that precipitated exciting changes. One of our schools, Costaño School, was awarded a very large federal grant toward academic improvement programs. MIS (Music In the Schools) has had a successful program at this school for many years, with the full support of the current principal, Gina Sudaria. Ms. Sudaria decided that she would use the grant to fund, among other things, a school-wide music program. She asked MIS to recruit a credentialed music teacher for Costaño School and to fund an afterschool music program with this teacher. We found an outstanding teacher who just started classes on January 3 and hopes to launch an afterschool strings program in the near future.
As a side benefit, the Costaño grant has freed MIS funds that would have been used for classroom instruction there. MIS has informed the principal at Willow Oaks School that we can add instruction time for the kindergarten through 2nd grades there, starting this month. The principal was thrilled that we could expand our program there and has arranged for multipurpose-room access every week for these classes. The teacher will be Michel Hardbarger, our Orff -trained teacher who is already one of the best-loved teachers at the Ravenswood Child Development Center.
MIS has more great news from its program at Green Oaks Academy. A few days before the school year began, we lost the teacher who had been working for us there for three years. Our search for a replacement took two months, but we found a wonderful teacher, Soraya Lugo. Ms. Lugo is from Puerto Rico; her fluency in Spanish is very helpful, even though our classes are taught in English. By February she will have her full K-12 single-subject music credential, which will enable her to provide much-needed release (planning) time for the classroom teachers.
Ms. Lugo loves folk music of all cultures and has a passion for preparing children for performances. She jumped at the chance to teach an after school chorus in addition to the classroom music program. Estimating that 20-30 students would sign up, imagine her delight when 40 children showed up for the first class! A concert is planned for the spring, to which we will invite friends and family as well as the school population.
MIS has great hopes that we can continue to build our afterschool program offerings, which will give children a positive outlet for their energy as well as performance opportunities in singing and instrumental music. The performances will help build self-esteem among the children and forge stronger connections between the school and the community.
MIS added several more board members in 2010, all of whom come with strong skills and connections:
PACO is one of a growing number of local supporters for MIS's mission. PACO's musical director, Ben Simon, loves what MIS is doing and has offered to have his five youth orchestras give a joint concert in East Palo Alto in March to benefit our program. We hope the concert will demonstrate to the community what a string program could be like for their children. We are currently looking for sponsors for the concert. The Jamba Juice franchise has provided us with tags barcoded for Music in the Schools Foundation. If you swipe this at the time of purchase, 10% of the profit from the sale is donated to MIS. We have already sent out hundreds of the tags to individual supporters and local schools. Kepler's bookstore in Menlo Park gives us a percentage of any sale where they buyer mentions MIS.
These music classes are provided free of charge to the district, so MIS is actively seeking new ways to fund as well as enlarge our program. We would like to reach another 1,000 students in the district with our in-classroom program and are confident that as word spreads about us, we will attract more donors. Currently, it takes about $20,000 per year to fund a K-5 program for 500 students. We need to raise $50,000 per year to sustain our current program, but we have set a goal to raise $75,000 per year by 2012.