A Slocan Valley parent wants her kids to be in the Mount Sentinel Secondary School band.
But there is no such band. There’s just a roomful of instruments left over from the glory days of a band that was considered extraordinary for the size of the school.
“It is sad, looking through that locked door to the music room with all that incredible equipment sitting there,” said Nicole Carere, “and knowing full well that many alumni who graduated from this school program have pursued successful careers in music.”
She’s started an online petition, so far with 136 signatures, asking that the school district reinstate the band program. Her children are in Grade 7, 5, and Kindergarten. They attend Nelson Waldorf School but they’ll be going to high school at Mount Sentinel.
“When I went to a meeting at Mount Sentinel in June they were going on about all the money they spent on computers and technology, which is great, but at the same time, I said you have no music program and you are telling me you have enough devices in the school for each student to have access to about three of them.”
The band program was reduced gradually over several years, ending in 2013.
Principal Glen Campbell says it was because fewer students were choosing music. He also says there was a decline in music instruction at the three feeder elementary schools — Brent Kennedy, Winlaw Elementary and W.E. Graham — which meant fewer students arriving at Mount Sentinel were prepared for music and therefore did not choose it.
The school also lost Rick Lingard, whose bands were regularly invited to national festival competitions for concert bands, and whose student jazz bands were a powerful force at the Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival in Moscow, Idaho.
“Often with great programs there are great people,” Campbell said, “and when those great people retire or leave often the program goes soon after.”
Campbell said he thinks the petition is well intentioned.
“I get it,” he said. “We revere a lot of things in our past and when we look back they sometimes seem much better and stronger than they may have been in reality. But that is part of our nostalgia, as humans we do that.”
Lingard now runs a private music academy in Nelson. He left Mount Sentinel in 2013 after futile attempts, he says, to maintain his band program in the midst of several years of budget cuts, changes to course offerings and timetables, declining enrolment, and an education system that sees music as a low priority.
Campbell told the Star that if 20 kids wanted to take band and he could find a teacher to teach it, there would be a class. However, there is currently no band program for those kids to sign up to.
In Lingard’s time at the school he had several band classes of various ages and levels with sometimes as few as 10 students in each one.
He says music programs are crucial for students “lost in the tumult of adolescence. Kids whose souls are calmed and/or jump started with the experience of learning an instrument and having the opportunity to make music with a group of other musicians. This experience, for those of us who have had it, is transformative. It stays with you your whole life.”
He cites statistics about schools that have significantly increased music instruction resulting in impressive improvements in all subjects.
The Star asked School District 8 superintendent Christine Perkins what it would take to get a band program reinstated at Mt. Sentinel.
“What would it take? Bums in seats. There has to be a demand from the students. In high schools, elective courses do not run unless a significant number of students pick them. However, due to the online petition, and obvious support from alumni, I have asked for a survey of students in the Slocan Valley to be done. These days, if students don’t want it, the course does not run.
“But it is a Catch-22,” she says. “If students are not introduced to music in elementary schools, how do they know they want it or not by secondary school? Electives, which music is, fall into this tenuous category.”
Principals at Winlaw, Brent Kennedy and W.E. Graham elementary schools told the Star that although they do not have a dedicated music teacher, they do teach music in various ways.
Perkins agrees with Lingard that there is a lot of research showing that music education has impressive pay-offs.
“There is research that indicates music programs help improve results in literacy, numeracy, and other areas of school achievement (including) the core competencies of communication, creativity, and collaboration,” she said.
Carere is fired up and optimistic.
“This is going to happen. We are going to find a way — find the teachers, find the programming. We owe it to the kids.”
