Scott Swanson
A group of educators and local citizens is asking the Sweet Home School Board to restore an elementary-level music teaching position in the district.
SHOCASE members appeared before the board at its Feb. 11 meeting to make a pitch for establishing a formal music program in the elementary schools.
SHOCASE, which stands for Sweet Home Oregon Coalition for Artistic and Scholastic Enrichment, aims to promote access, appreciation and understanding of the arts in the community. It was formed nearly two years ago by members of the Sweet Home Auditorium Remodel Committee, SHARC.
Stefani Brown, a counselor at Hawthorne School, served as the group’s spokesperson at the board meeting, saying that the goal is to “bring culture to Sweet Home” in “lots of ways,” but specifically through music instruction.
Retired Holley teacher Kathi Collins, whose husband Ken was the district’s band teacher before his retirement in 2001, cited a John Hopkins University study entitled “The SocioEmotional Benefits of the Arts,” which concludes that a “well-rounded education” requires instruction in the arts.
“One factor that may contribute to reduced school and life success among low-income students is their reduced access to arts education, which limits opportunities to build socioemotional skills, including an understanding that skill results from practice, failure, and recovery, not raw talent.”
The study found that involvement in the arts tends to correlate in students’ level of school engagement.
District choir director Duncan Tuomi quoted the district’s mission statement, “The goal of the mission of our school district is to give every student every opportunity to become a successful person in an ever-changing world.”
He said exposure to the arts is particularly important between ages 6 to 8, “that students get the opportunity to learn and play and grow in a whole variety of different ways, noting how training for success in local high school athletic programs begins at those young ages.
“The same is very much achievable through music programs but it must happen at an early age.”
Tuomi said starting young gives students tools not just in music but in every field. Music, he said, is an individual intelligence, but is closely linked to others, and is “one of the pathways” to academic success.
“I could talk for ages about the way a balanced education in the arts positively correlates with increased test scores in other areas.”
He told board members they probably already knew and agreed with him on that point.
“I will simply say that knowledge is valuable, but becomes worthless without passion,” he said.
City Council member Diane Gerson, a retired school principal and former School Board member herself, said she’d sat before a similar school board 30 years ago, “trying to get music into my school.”
“We’ve been trying for a long time. We know how important it is. That’s why I’m here.”
She said she considers the correlation between a decline in both music instruction in local schools and in math scores is “very important.”
“I think it was 20 or 30 years back, when music started to disappear from schools because we couldn’t afford music teachers, our math scores started to decline and we haven’t been able to pick them back up, because we haven’t had music.”
Gerson cited the fourth goal of the School District’s Comprehensive Plan: a thriving community.
“I just want to remind you music not only soothes the soul, but rouses the passion and stirs our pride. Whether it’s a jazz band at a basketball game or the Hallelujah Chorus at the end of the Singing Christmas Tree, we are a community which comes together with this universal language called music.”
Brown told the board that SHOCASE was asking for “one elementary teacher – one – just to start up, to go to all the elementary schools.”
“Don’t worry about the logistics – we’ll take care of that part,” she added.
Former Sweet Home High School student Colby Montague, who’s now attending Linn-Benton Community College, told the board he participated in choir, band and drama during his years in Sweet Home schools.
“I’m a very artistic person,” he said. “The arts are my life.” Going through the high school program was slightly infuriating, just because we had lesser equipment, we didn’t have the nice things that I heard my friends in Lebanon talking about – nice equipment, nice lights that worked most of the time.
“It makes me really excited to see what the next years will produce.”
Board members did not comment, other than to thank the group for the presentation.
But Supt. Tom Yahraes said later that the presentation by SHOCASE “solidified what we have been attempting to building into our program for our K through sixth-grade schools.”
He said that re-instituting music is part of the district’s five-year strategic plan, which has already seen regular physical education re-introduced into the elementary schools.
“We want a day when all students can benefit from musical instruction,” Yahraes said. “We have worked hard to re-instate K-6 PE back into the elementary schools. What SHOCASE is presenting, with which we concur, will be an attempt to re-instate budgetary discipline to building music programs back into our K-6 schools.”
District administrators will be watching state revenues over the upcoming months “to see where they end up,” since, Yahraes said, the district’s budget is based on those numbers.
Yahraes noted that families in the district often lack the resources to provide music lessons outside of school.
“It’s incumbent upon the schools to provide music education for all students because music is a part of the fabric of who we are as people. We have feeder programs for athletics and it’s our desire to provide feeder programs for music – choir and band.”