Northern Section Update

Tanner Johns Northern Section President

Jim Norman’s musical studies began at age eleven when he joined the “Weldonians” marching band and was introduced to band music and rudimental style drumming. Jim attended public schools in Oakland, CA, continuing to play in concert bands, jazz bands and weekend bands until graduating from Cal State Hayward in 1976 with a major in percussion performance and music education. The following fall began what was to become a teaching career which has spanned four plus decades in the community of Greenville in Plumas County, CA, teaching instrumental, vocal and general music in grades K through twelve, as well as math, art, P.E., and business and finance.

Jim has been active in CMEA having served as coordinator for the Northern California Junior High Honor Band and Select Choir, as well as hosting and coordinating numerous regional festivals and honor bands.

Jim has guest conducted several honor bands, and has received the California Music Educators Association Northern California Outstanding Music Educator award, and Plumas Unified Teacher of the Year.

In retirement, Jim continues to compose and arrange for band, jazz band, and orchestra, and stays fairly busy doing instrument repair and maintenance for Plumas Unified Schools, as well as shop projects, daily walks and bike rides, photography and reading.

Jim and his wife Gina live in their 100+ year old house in Taylorsville. They have two grown daughters who both attended GHS and played in the Greenville Band, and have since graduated from college and are living in the Bay Area. He and Gina enjoy camping at Lassen Park, vegetable gardening, and fly fishing on Hat Creek as well as other undisclosed locations.

What is your idea of advocacy?

Advocacy is about building relationships with students, parents, community, and (perhaps most importantly) colleagues. This is especially true in a small school setting, where those of us who teach elective classes depend on enrollment, which can be detrimentally affected by any number of factors, including: scheduling conflicts, graduation requirements, remediation classes, as well as other elective programs competing for the same students.

Why is it important for the arts and music?

Beyond the obvious exposure provided by public performances and exhibits, advocacy is important for arts and music because successful programs have continuity, allowing the inclusion of different grade levels and experience levels, which leads to collaboration between students through role modeling and social interaction, facilitating a strong connection between fine arts education with value judgements and life skills.

Have your ideas about advocacy changed over the course of your career? How?

When I started teaching at GHS in 1976, I was the staff youngster in a field of OLD PROS, and really had no idea of how to build a program, and advocacy became overshadowed by survival. After a few rough years, I started to settle in and set my ego aside, and began to see the bigger picture, and realized that the process involves establishing those relationships not only with students, but with teachers, administrators, and (in our case) the counselor, because the counselor wrote the master schedule.

Over time student advocacy gained importance as they became faced with increasing graduation requirements (including lengthening the school year), increased rigor in core classes oftentimes brought on by (flawed) federal legislation to teach to the “standards,” and the competitive nature of qualifying for and being accepted into college. For example, on more that one occasion I had students opt to take a year off from band so that they could take a second science class, because it would “look good” on their transcripts.

How does advocacy for music differ for rural communities than it might for other areas?

Rural school districts are oftentimes in a unique situation. For example, Plumas Unified has four distinct and autonomous communities, each being their own attendance area, spread over 1.2 million acres, with the total number of students district wide (for this example grades 9-12) still being less than enrollment of one large urban high school, yet we have four of everything: campuses, principals, teaching staffs, transportation routes, band directors, athletic coaches, food service facilities, custodial staffs and so on…..

That said, there are a lot of expenses, and money is always an issue. Perhaps the strongest advocacy force in our district has been parents, and we all know that board members and administrators will listen to parents. Parents want their schools to offer opportunities for their kids, and when their kids come home from school excited about what they did in band that day, or that they had a good practice in extracurricular athletics, it registers with parents because they want their kids to be happy, and they express that through supporting what’s going on in their schools.

How might they be the same?

Parents will have similar values regardless of school size, however, larger schools by nature encourage specialization. For instance, one of my former students from GHS moved to San Jose and attended high school there for one year. She enrolled in band, and had to work really hard to keep up, and was one of the very few students in the band who did not have a private teacher. As a result, parents, like students, become more specialized, unlike in rural schools where it’s not uncommon for parents to advocate for their students who are on the honor roll, play two or three sports, play in band, and are active in student government.

Sometimes, being an advocate means being proactive. One year, our principal approached me and two other teachers and told us that he was buried, and could we draft a master schedule for the following year. We agreed, and met after school in a classroom and talked for a bit to understand the scope of the project, then began to sketch it out on the whiteboard, revising as we went. The following week the principal presented it to the faculty for comments. After running several students’ names through on a “dry run,” a few adjustments were made and it was adopted.

The two colleagues with whom I worked taught (primarily) math and science, and our interaction helped me understand the student placement process in math and science courses, and it helped them to understand the fragility of music programs based on scheduling. After that, it became fairly commonplace for faculty members to help design the schedule, which in turn benefitted all of our classes and programs.

What role do the arts and music play in the communities of rural California? In your opinion, why are they so important to these communities?

Arts and music, along with academics, athletics, and school climate, all contribute to the culture of these rural communities. In many cases, the school is the main hub of the community, and the school activities – back to school night, homecomings, music and drama performances, art exhibits, senior project presentations, science fair, and home athletic events – are a big draw and are well attended by parents and community members alike, as a show of support and appreciation for the local school.

How do you think the music program in your school was considered important enough to keep through budget cuts, natural disasters, and so much more?

One challenge with budget cuts is parity. If something is cut in one community and not in another, there will likely be some angry parents. Plumas Unified has (for the most part) really stood by music education, especially since the first big budget crisis in the early 80’s when our superintendent intervened to prevent scheduled layoffs of music teachers by providing funding through the Plumas County Office of Education to expand elementary music programs to include classroom music for all grades, in addition to chorus and band for the intermediate grades. This step made a huge difference in establishing music as a part of each student’s curriculum beginning in Kindergarten, it strengthened the importance of music in school, and was appreciated by the parents. Establishing a K-12 music curriculum throughout the district was perhaps THE important step in protecting music education from pending and future budget cuts.

Since then, support has been fairly consistent, although most recently the effects of COVID and the destructive Dixie fire have taken their toll, not just on music programs, but on all aspects of education, as well as local economies and community culture, to the extent that everyone is playing catch-up, and rebuilding in one way or another.

Consistency: I was committed to GHS. My family lives in the community, we shop here, our kids were raised here, my wife worked here – I guess you could say they were stuck with me, so I had to figure out how to make the kids want to take band, because I was pretty sure it would never be a graduation requirement, thankfully so.

This led me to constantly re-examine what I was doing in the classroom, to be my own critic, to listen to the wisdom of my wife when I would come home and want to quit because of junior high kids, or after the band got dinged at festival for playing music that was too hard.

Accessibility: I had one principal who really had an impact on my teaching, because his mantra was “EVERY STUDENT SUCCEEDS.”

While this sentiment was not readily embraced by several of my colleagues in the core classes, I took it to heart and began to look at teaching differently, not so much from the authoritarian conductor standpoint, but from the “how do I make sure that everyone in band, from the hot first trumpet player, to the 3rd clarinet quiet kid is having a quality experience?”

Tradition: Kids like tradition, they like knowing what to expect, they also like bringing the younger kids into the group and letting them know that “we did this last year, and it was fun.” The teacher challenge in this is being able to think outside the box without destroying the box.

Closing thought

The spectrum of advocacy can cover a broad range, from submitting a short blurb to the school’s weekly newsletter, to confronting the school board over budget cuts and/or layoffs. Music is something about which we all share a common passion and is a big part of our lives both in and out of the classroom; but for our students, music is one component of their educational experience, and we owe it to them to recognize that, and to make every effort not only to do the best job that we can as music teachers, but also, to help them maintain a balance between music, academics, extracurriculars, as well as family and personal needs.