Scholarship Recipients

Bay Section Update

Sandra Lewis Bay Section President

Greetings from CMEA Bay Section!

Here in Bay Section we have just finished out our first “normal” festival season since COVID hit in 2020. We had some “bumps” along the way as we reacquainted ourselves with director, site host and festival protocols, but overall Bay Section students and educators seemed thrilled to be performing for our adjudicators.

We also had a significant response to our festival feedback forms this year and as you can imagine, these survey forms help the board look at areas for improvement for both adjudication and our festival sites.

Since this was my first year as acting president, I must admit that I had my share of “bumps” as well. I am very grateful for the support of the CMEA State Board. When our school Zoom no longer had unlimited minutes, Trish Adams, the CMEA State Executive Administrator, graciously helped our section out by logging on our board meetings with the State Zoom link. I am also grateful for Anne Fennell for her wonderful keynote presentation at the Bay Section Winter Conference in January.

Also crucial to our success this year was the unwavering support that I received from our Full Board and of course the expertise and knowledge of our Executive Board.

The many years of experience from our current Bay Section Executive Board definitely helped keep the year running smoothly. I would like to publicly recognize and acknowledge Keith Johnson, Past-President; Craig Bryant, President Elect; Angelina Fitzhugh, Secretary; Paul Lorigan, Executive Secretary; and Bruce Lengacher, Adjudication Chair. Our current Treasurer, Tim Walker, had to leave this year due to health concerns but I am happy to say that we now have a new Treasurer, Joe Kelly, whose enthusiasm and interest make me grateful for his willingness to accept the position.

A few months ago, I was looking at the end of May as a symbolic finish line. As I started to prepare for the end of the musical school year and the various Bay Section festivals and meetings…. I began to think about NEXT year! I reflected on some of the challenges and success that we experienced and started to plan on how to implement and streamline certain things for our conference and festivals next year. As I write this article, our CMEA Bay Section Executive Board will meet at least twice this summer to discuss and clean up various forms and procedures, and we are excited about piloting some new ideas at our festivals next year.

I know that all of us will have a chance to recharge this summer with music, friends and perhaps even a change of scenery as we visit with family. As you are away from the “job” of your classroom, boardroom or podium, feel free to reflect on things that you think went well and other items that you would love to change. Without deadlines and crucial rehearsals looming in the background, it is sometimes easier to gain clarity and solve some of the issues that seem so challenging while the school year is in progress.

I hope you have a relaxing summer and I am looking forward to the next academic year!

Capitol Section Update

Christopher J. Tootle Capitol Section President

Advocating for visual and performing arts (VAPA) education and resources can, many times, seem like an unending battle with nothing but failures and defeats. There are times, however, when through teamwork, perseverance, and maybe even a little bit of fate, advocacy efforts can pay off. The following is one success story from my little corner of the Capitol Section that I hope will inspire others to start or continue their own advocacy efforts.

In the summer of 2018, I had just finished my 4th year at my current job in the Elk Grove Unified School District (EGUSD). I was one of several Arts educators and community members who attended a school board meeting to advocate for VAPA education and resources. We had no idea how important that meeting would turn out to be for the long-term health, survival, and growth of EGUSD’s VAPA education. We were there to request solutions for three big VAPA needs: 1. a comprehensive VAPA education growth plan, 2. a district-level VAPA Director, and 3. regular district funding for existing VAPA programs.

The EGUSD school board listened, understood the needs, and immediately took steps to chip away at those three big needs. The district began providing much-needed funds to already existing programs all across the sixth largest school district in the state. The money was used for instruments, instrument repair, sheet music, chairs, stands, etc. In addition to the funding, the already-existing district VAPA Steering Committee created the first version of our EGUSD VAPA Education Plan. In 2019, a VAPA Director was hired and the VAPA Education Plan was adopted. All three big needs were met and great things were happening!

In early 2020, two things happened that nearly spelled disaster. The new VAPA Director resigned and immediately afterward - bam! – COVID hit. There were so many questions, so many obstacles, so many unknowns. But thanks to the wisdom of our school board, a new VAPA director, Jennifer Wilbanks, was hired right away. Mrs. Wilbanks has been a champion for VAPA programs in the EGUSD as well as Capitol Section ever since. She was one of several district-level VAPA leaders across the Capitol Section that met on a regular basis to plan for specific VAPA needs during Covid. As for our school district, Mrs. Wilbanks made sure we had everything we needed to make music during all the phases of Covid - 100% online, hybrid classes, as well as the transition back to 100% inperson learning in the fall of 2021.

This year has been an incredible year thanks to the continued support of the EGUSD school board, administration, and VAPA education community. The district hired 4 VAPA Coordinators to assist Mrs. Wilbanks at the district level. The district partnered with the Mandarins Drum and Bugle Corp to provide before/after school beginning band classes at all elementary schools. Funding was provided for three festivals: a district jazz festival and two concert band festivals in partnership with the Capitol Section’s Golden Empire Music Festival. In addition, funding continued to be provided to existing VAPA programs.

If your own advocacy efforts feel overwhelming, don’t give up. Every little victory matters, and sometimes they can add up to big changes in the long run. Hopefully, with the funds from Prop 28, and this example from my own little corner of the Capitol Section, other schools districts, schools, and teachers in the CMEA can be inspired to continue their own advocacy efforts.

Central Section Update

Michael Tackett

Central Section Past President

Greetings from the Central Section!

It has been one of my greatest honors to serve as the CMEA Central Section President over the past two years. How the time has flown! I am excited for the future and to witness the magnificent work Elisha Wilson, our new President, will complete over her two-year term. Congratulations also go out to our PresidentElect, Ashley Shine-Dirlam, and newly elected Secretary, Victoria Kuykendall. All three ladies are great assets to our section!

During May and June, we were busy completing the revision of our Section Handbook and By-Laws. At our final yearly meeting/ dinner in June, we honored several retirees and two outgoing board members. Congratulations to these Central Section retirees for their hard work and dedication to music education: Brad Pickett, Martha Redstone, Rebecca Trevino, Kim Ream, Donna Steigleder, Dr. Thomas Hiebert, Peter Vanderpaardt, and Anne Hendrickson. These educators gave countless hours for the success of their students. We appreciate their service to music education.

I would personally like to thank our two outgoing board members Tony Mowrer and Steve McKeithen. Tony was on the board of directors for sixteen years and served the past several years as our secretary. Tony was the “go-to man” and could usually answer questions no one else knew the answer to. Steve served two years as President-Elect, two years as President, and the past two years as Past-President. Steve really helped me out with the transition into each of my positions and did a marvelous job getting us through the horrific 2020-2021 years. Thank you, Tony and Steve, for serving the CMEA Central Section!

Looking ahead, we will be filling a few other positions on the board. If you are interested in serving the Central Section, please contact Elisha Wilson through our website to inform her of your interest.

I am thrilled to serve two more years as Past-President and look forward to the progress our section makes in serving our music educators!

Central Coast Section Update

Sam Oh

Central Coast Section President

I want to thank all the Central Coast teachers for their input, time and patience as we did our best to transition back to normalcy. Our honor events were successful and it was great to have a live audience this year. Next year, we hope to bring back our festivals to full normalcy as well. Out of the four festivals, YES! (young ensemble showcase), solo, instrumental and vocal festival, we successfully had our YES! and solo festival happen, but not our instrumental and vocal festival due to the rainstorm that flooded many parts of our counties. The rainstorm made many mini islands of certain towns and cities in which roads and schools had to be closed down for a few days.

So here are our goals for the next school year:

1. Bring back more schools to audition for the honor event

2. Bring back all our festivals, and hope Mother Nature does not interfere again

3. Update our by-laws

4. Outreach to San Luis Obispo county

I want to take this opportunity to thank our CCS board for helping me get through this school year acting as president. I really appreciate Diane Gehling and Maria Carney giving me guidance and advice on how to approach many situations where I felt lost. I also want to thank Barry Capiaux, president elect, for taking over one of our honor events as MC as I was getting ready for the birth of my first child. I am not going to lie, there were a lot of bumps in the road, but I had a great team that helped me go through the times where I felt the most stress and troubled.

As the new school year is about to start in a few months, I cannot wait to face the new challenges that are approaching and with a great support team, I believe we can get anything done.

Right now our calendar seems to be up to date with board meetings and events penciled in, and the only changes we had to make is our High School Honor Band/Orchestra. Our usual dates for that event are the same week as CASMEC, so we decided to change the event from February 1st-3rd to February 8th-10th.

North Coast Section Update

Collin Kirkwood

North Coast Section President

Hello from North Coast!

We have had an eventful few months on the Northern Coast. In March we held our All-County Music Festival which showed off our 6th through 8th grade students. They only had two days to rehearse and they put on a wonderful concert. We had a High School Jazz Band, Orchestra, Concert Band, and Choir, as well as a Middle School Band, Orchestra, and Choir. We had students representing 24 local schools. It was amazing to see the high level of musicianship that is happening in the North Coast Section.

In April and May we held our Jazz Festival, Choral Festival and Instrumental Festival. The musicianship that the students demonstrated was exciting to hear. It was also nice to see students happy to be performing for each other. I know my students were very happy to see other schools performing and kept talking about how great everyone did.

We had a chapter-wide meeting this past weekend to plan events for next year. It was nice to see so many teachers taking time out of their weekend to discuss how best to service students next year. We are planning on holding the same festivals as last year and we already have all the dates figured out. We are also bringing back a Middle School Instrumental Music Day. Our goal is to get all interested middle school students in our chapter to receive a day of group instruction on their primary instrument by a qualified musician/teacher.

Daniel Sedgwick is a high school teacher in our chapter area. He has a very exciting instrument repair program that he started a few years ago. We wrote a brief history about how he got the program started and why he thinks other districts should start their own instrument repair programs. He asked me to include his message in this article.

Band Instrument Repair and CTE in high school

Unless I am mistaken, I am the only teacher that is currently teaching band instrument repair in the high school setting in California. This was not always the case, and there were two more, but for various reasons those programs are no longer running. Even if we had all three programs running, it would not be enough. But I get ahead of myself - first a brief history. If you’d rather skip the history, just move on to paragraph five.

Del Norte County is the furthest county north on the California coast. When I started teaching here 15 years ago, the band program was strong but we had a huge problem. Our old inventory was not great and every year we had a choice: fully fix a few instruments a year or get as many instruments “playable” as cheaply as possible. I saw a lot of that working in a repair shop in college. Right away I started using the skills I gained working at the repair shop to make the inventory better. I started with basic pad work, eventually moving to tenon corks. Word that I could do basic work on clarinets and saxophones got around very quickly. This allowed us to spend our very minimal budget on some of the larger projects to make them playable instruments again. While it did help, it still felt like putting band aids over older band aids. This stayed pretty much the status quo for about 6 years. back, we had a middle school student drop a bari sax to the ground and it was not pretty with bent posts, bent keys, and body damage. One of the students was able to get it playing within two hours!

We now have a comprehensive parts closet and can fix/repair almost any issue that comes up. This coming school year, the Instrument repair class will fall under CTE (Career and Technical Education), and I now have my CTE credential under the Arts, Media and Entertainment Pathway. This program has challenged me and pushed me to grow and expand my education. I started out doing tenon corks and clarinet pads but now I can take apart a tuba, silver solder broken braces, remove dents and put the tuba back together. I became a member of NAPBIRT (National Association of Band Instrument Repair Technicians) and feel very much part of the repair community.

After year six and having more and more instruments going out of commission due to more severe damage, which I did not know how to fix, I decided it was time to do something more. A new colleague, Sara Rogers, joined the district and she was more than willing to go on this journey with me. Sara and I decided that trombones were the next step, as well as stuck trumpet slides. After a lot of Youtube videos and me apprenticing with a veteran instrument repair technician, Nick Rail in Santa Barbara, during my summer, we got very good at taking out the major dents from trombone slides and removing stuck slides from brass instruments. Sara is a rock star at repairing flutes. We made a deal that if I did tenon corks, she would do the flutes, and I very happily agreed! We did this for about three years but it still wasn’t enough.

We decided to dedicate a space for doing just instrument repair. We set up the shop and this helped us streamline and organize what we were doing, but the space was still not big enough. At this point we were servicing most of the instruments at DNUSD (Del Norte Unified School District) but only on an as-needed basis. In between moving the shop - the instrument repair class was born! The shop was really an oversized closet and the class had six students. It was very convenient during COVID-19 learning because only three students were allowed in the shop at once. The biggest problem was that there was no storage room. The class was also just an elective housed within VPA (Visual and Performing Arts).

Fast forward to today - here is where we stand. I now teach two instrument repair classes with 8-12 students in each section, and we have a shop that is 25’ x 60’ with a dedicated station for each student in the class, plus communal stations for dent repair, buffing, ultrasonic cleaning, and more. For the past 2 years, every instrument at DNUSD gets run through the shop for preventative maintenance at least once and we typically have less than a 24-hour turnaround on issues as they come up. And this is mostly student done. Of course Sara or I take care of the more challenging tasks, but most repair at this point is being done by the students. Getting instruments repaired faster has meant students aren’t waiting weeks to get an instrument back from an out-of-town shop. A couple years

Instrument repair is an important trade both for music education and the music community at large. If we do not have enough repair techs, our horns do not function properly. Students need to have quality and functional instruments to succeed in music. We are very short of qualified technicians in this sector. As a member of multiple service organizations, most tell me the same thing over and over: “We do not have enough techs in our area.” I was even approached by an employee at Yamaha regarding how we can get more classes going at the high school setting in order to start training the next generation of repair techs.

This article today is mostly about the backstory on how we achieved getting an instrument repair class at Del Norte High School. More importantly, I would like to start the conversation now about how other school sites across the state and country can start a program too. Rural areas like ours can rarely support a qualified repair technician in the area due to the small size. But, if a school district were to have a class with repair basics, they would only have to send out the difficult repairs, which could be a game changer for most instrumental programs. Not only would this save the district money, but it would also help ensure that future students will learn using functional and well-maintained instruments.

In conclusion, I am passionate about instrument repair and I am more than willing to help other school districts start a program. We have a desperate need for repair technicians in this state and also around the country. With a 95% job placement rate, students who go on to pursue a career in instrument repair will find a job with little to no trouble. Instrument repair programs have the potential to save districts money, prepare students for a profitable career, and also keep school instruments in good condition for all students.

If you have any questions for Daniel Sedgwick about the instrument repair program, feel free to email him at dsedgwick@ dnusd.org

Northern Section Update

Tanner Johns Northern Section President

Greetings from the Northern Section!

For as long as I’ve been associated with the Northern Section board I’ve asked the questions, “what does this organization do for its members and how can we better serve our membership?” With that in mind, I’d like to take a moment to highlight something new this year from the Northern Section - the Northern California Music Teacher Institute.

This week of professional development offered by CMEA-NS is for new and experienced teachers, and even collegiate membership. It’s going to be an incredible week and districts have professional development money to send you. Not only that, but if you register for units, complete the course, and are a CMEA/NAFME member from the Northern Section, your CMEA-NS chapter will reimburse you for the cost of those units - units that can advance you up your district salary schedule.

I hope everyone is taking advantage of their summer to refresh and reset. Please reach out at any time if you have questions about the Northern California Music Teacher Institute.