And the Bands Played On : In the Post-Prop. 13 Era, Schools : Are Finding New Ways to Make Music

On various Saturday nights in Cypress, Pat Howard is helping to run a bingo game to keep the musicians of the Cypress High School band in private instrumental music lessons.

In Placentia, meanwhile, Edda Barr and her daughter Heather might be dishing up food at a spaghetti dinner, or washing cars, or selling soap or Christmas wreaths, in order to keep the Valencia High School band in sousaphones.

And in Irvine, while Dick Kerns helps out with yet another bingo game to support the Irvine High School band, his son Eric is probably out hawking candy bars or singing at a paid job in order to pay the salary of the school’s choir accompanist.

Is this any way to run a school music program?

In post-Proposition 13 Orange County, music educators and others are finding that it’s the only way. During the more than 10 years since the budget-cutting initiative went into effect, many public school music teachers have discovered that the often rosy economic and administrative status quo of the mid-1970s, in which music programs enjoyed not only financial but political support, has evaporated.

But many school instrumental and choral music performance programs are rebounding and even thriving a decade later, the result of a combination of community and parental support, sympathetic administrations and school boards, a little wheeling and dealing, and a few pages borrowed from the gospel according to Prof. Harold Hill.

Wayne Nelson, the band director at Valencia High School in Placentia, plies his trade in a building that many colleges would covet. Standing out in stark modernity against the buff-colored 1930s-era structures that make up most of the campus, the music building contains a large band room; an adjacent choral room with built-in risers, sound and recording equipment; satellite locker facilities, and soundproof practice rooms. The building was built 4 years ago at a cost of slightly more than $1 million and designed by Nelson himself. A new campuswide electrical facility was also built to accommodate the new building at a cost of about $250,000.

The money came from state redevelopment funds earmarked for the refurbishment of old school facilities, Nelson said, and were allocated to Valencia High by the Placentia Unified School District. That the construction of the music building happened at all, however, is testimony to the kind of political clout that teacher skill and inspiration, administrative backing and, often, a strong independent booster organization can bring to bear.

It is Valencia’s band boosters--and similar organizations at other Orange County schools that are made up mostly of parents of the student musicians--who can take a good measure of the credit for regenerating the music program after Proposition 13.

“Things were probably the worst at the beginning, right after Proposition 13 passed,” said Nelson, who has taught music in Orange County schools since 1966 and was the band director at Cypress High School when Proposition 13 went into effect. “Things were cut back so fast. There were cuts in transportation, instructional budgets, uniforms, music. And in some districts, their priorities for education in the arts weren’t high. They stopped repairing instruments and stopped buying new ones and programs just shriveled.”

But at Valencia, where Nelson has been teaching for 7 years, the band boosters--and often the band members themselves--have sold candy bars, jewelry and soap, held newspaper drives, spaghetti dinners, garage and parking lot sales and car washes and generally provided the program with enough visibility and money to weather the post-Proposition 13 malaise. Nelson estimated that the boosters provide “somewhere between $20,000 and $23,000 a year” to the program.

“We (the boosters) have to pay for all the other salaries, like the drum instructor or the person who lays out the field shows,” said Edda Barr, the Valencia booster, who has seen three children through the music program there. “And any new instruments, or any instruments that are rented, we pay for that, too.”

Barr’s daughter Heather, a senior flute and piccolo player, said that because Valencia has built up a tradition of high musical quality, “more people are willing to get involved and spend the long hours.”

Also, she said, skilled student musicians consistently arrive at Valencia from junior high schools in the area where programs are strong.

“The community support for music in all schools is very high in this district,” Nelson said. “And the board (of education) is aware that it’s politically astute to support this kind of program. They don’t want to upset a powerful group of band boosters.”

Nelson also credited the board and administrators in the Placentia Unified School District for “having fine arts within their philosophy of basic education. When you’ve got that basic philosophy, you’ll find ways to adjust the money and the priorities to keep these programs alive. We’ve all adjusted, and in adjusting we’ve found other ways to raise money. It’s not Darwinism, exactly, but it’s existing where you are and making it work.”

In the Irvine High School choral program, accomplishing that means, in a sense, singing for your supper. Through campaigns such as candy bar sales, but also through proceeds earned from paid choral singing jobs, students pay the salary of Jill Carter, their piano accompanist.

“The students realized the need for an accompanist,” said Eric Kerns, who sings in the school’s pop vocal ensemble. “So we do fund-raising performances, like at the officers’ wives club (at the Marine Corps Air Station at El Toro). We raise a lot of money for the choral department that way. The students know there isn’t enough money for what we need, so in order to better our education, we raise it ourselves. It’s not an extreme difficulty, and we’re willing to do it.”

Such a strategy was new 10 years ago to Richard Messenger, the school’s director of choral music. “I’d never done any fund raising before 1978, but now I find that I have to use my kids as sales people.”

He estimated that students in his four choral groups will raise about $21,000 this year through the sale of candy bars, cookies and other items, as well as through the benefit performances. Money also comes in from the Irvine Education Foundation, a body that promotes music in the district’s schools and collects money from a large student concert held in April. Those proceeds are distributed to the school music programs.

At Cypress High School, however, band director Darlene Hale’s program hinges on a single word: bingo. For the last 5 years, the music program at Cypress has been supported in large measure by regular bingo games that are held to raise money specifically for school music.

“It basically supports our program,” Hale said. “Some money is provided through district funds for uniforms and textbooks, and the principal supplies our transportation budget. But probably our biggest items are instruments and staff, and the bingo helps pay for them. Outside of support from your administration, the boosters are the most important thing.”

Those boosters’ efforts “come in right under $100,000 every year,” according to their president, Pat Howard. The nonprofit bingo scheme makes so much money, in fact, that unusual programs sometimes must be instituted to spend it all. At Cypress, this means that each instrumental music student is routinely offered a half an hour of private music lessons each week, and the teacher’s fee is paid from the bingo fund.

“I don’t think there’s any other school in Southern California that does that,” said Hale, whose program fields three concert bands, a marching band and a jazz ensemble.

“The private lessons make up part of our grade (in band),” said Carl Nelson, the band’s drum major and the son of Valencia High’s Wayne Nelson, “and I feel that helps us a lot. And encouragement is a big part of it.”

Said the band’s student president, Matt Batezel: “Miss Hale is always pushing us to do our best. As long as I’ve been here, we’ve had good bands. I think one of the main reasons is that the parents work hard at the bingo. Parents and a director who cares; those are the two biggest factors.”

But bingo pays the freight.

“It’s indispensable, it actually is,” Howard said. “The kids couldn’t begin to do the things they do--hire the extra instructors, get the music they need, the new instruments--without it. There’s no way the school district could afford all that. What it means is that the kids don’t have to spend every hour selling candy or whatever. They can concentrate on their music.”

Howard’s daughter, Beth, is a junior and began playing clarinet in junior high, which Howard said is fertile ground for student musicians in Cypress.

“The junior high program where she went, at Lexington Junior High, is superb,” Howard said. “One day Beth came home and said, ‘Mom, I want to take beginning band.’ She’d never thought of anything like that in her life.”

Bingo is also used for fund raising at Irvine High, but the proceeds are shared between the instrumental music ensembles and the athletic teams, said Dick Kerns, the father of Eric Kerns, who plays trombone and baritone horn in the band as well as sings in one of the choral ensembles.

“If we didn’t have bingo, we would not have the instrumental music department we have at Irvine,” he said. “For instance, there are about 45 string players in the orchestra, and that’s unheard of these days in high schools.”

Still, bingo games remain a relative rarity for Orange County school music program. There may be reluctance on the part of the school district board to sanction a gaming enterprise for fund raising, said Linda Owen, the music coordinator for the Placentia Unified School District. Also, said Jack Vaughn, the Irvine Unified School District’s fine arts coordinator, “you have to have a devoted clientele of parents who will volunteer their time to do it. In a bedroom community where most parents are working, it often isn’t conceivable.”

Still, some sort of outside money is seen by many teachers as essential.

Jennifer McBride, Trabuco Hills High School’s instrumental music teacher, like many other high school music teachers, keeps her program afloat with independent fund raising.

“You can’t survive unless you say you’re going to do at least one sale a year,” she said. “Right now, my kids are selling candy bars to death. But music is the kind of activity that draws people who are doing it for the good of the cause, and somehow they seem to come up with the money.”

It isn’t all money. County music educators and administrators say that lack of it does not necessarily mean a program will decline, and plenty of it does not absolutely ensure that it will flourish. Proposition 13, they say, may have been the bellwether, but it has not proven to be the absolute determiner.

One telling statistic is the base revenue limit of a school district, the figure that indicates how much money is budgeted for each student in the district.

According to Vaughn, among the 12 unified school districts in the county, most of the districts that have the highest per-pupil budget figure have the weakest music programs, while those near the bottom are flourishing.

For instance, the Newport Mesa Unified School District, which has the second-highest base revenue limit at $2,934 per pupil, has a music program that Dick Watts, the district’s former director of fine and performing arts, called “one of the weakest in the state.” Conversely, the Capistrano Unified School District, second to last with a per-pupil figure of $2,644, has “totally rebuilt (its) music program and surpassed the level (it) was at prior to the passage of Proposition 13,” said the district’s music coordinator, Austin Buffum.

“I think the most significant factor is the support, the philosophy and the priorities of the board and the superintendent,” Buffum said. “Music and the arts are always things that are being questioned. After Proposition 13, some districts were able to bring it back, and others just left it the way it was. What there really needs to be is a climate for music in a district. If that’s there, there will always be ways of having a (music) program. If not, there seems to be no way to do it.”

Said Vaughn: “My hypothesis has always been that money is not a factor. The factor is the community support and the community’s awareness of music instruction in the classroom.”

Still, realities such as declining enrollment and lack of teacher competence or experience can hamstring a music program already weakened by lack of money. Such is the case at Newport Mesa, said Watts, whose job was discontinued last year.

“At one time,” Watts said, “I think we had a very superior music program in Newport Mesa, but since we got the fiscal squeeze with Proposition 13, along with a declining enrollment, we’ve been forced to cut back fiscally.”

Watts estimated that about 26,000 students were enrolled in kindergarten through 12th grade in Newport Mesa in 1978. Today, he said, that figure is around 15,000.

Since Proposition 13, Watts said, the district has closed 16 elementary and intermediate schools. And, he added, high school enrollment continues to decline. The district has no elementary school music performance program.

The district, Watts said, “has a large number of older teachers, and when they retire they’re simply not replaced.”

And, said Vaughn, “if you look at the districts that have lost their elementary (music) programs, it is now reflected in the quality of their high school programs.”

The Newport Mesa district administration, said Watts, “would like to have (a broader music program), but they don’t give it the same priority as academic classes. The state has put on a big push toward academic classes because there’s been a dissatisfaction with the academic background of youngsters graduating from high school.”

In addition, Vaughn said, before Proposition 13 junior high and high school days were longer, offering more periods and courses from which to choose. Today, he said, there is less time, and “whenever somebody mentions something, like computers, they make an elective out of it, so there’s a broader range of choices--more academic requirements and a broader elective base.”

At Valencia High and other schools, however, music often is the elective of choice. Traci Aratari begins her day with band during the 7 a.m. “zero period”--an added, credited period made available for physical education and music--and often rehearses after school late into the evening, said her father, Fred Aratari. He’s president of Valencia Instrumental Parents, the music program’s booster club.

“It’s basically pride in the program,” he said. “The kids want to have a winning group. It’s become a kind of tradition. It’s like Notre Dame. Victory breeds itself. A successful program breeds a successful program. And the parents are conditioned to seeing the good in it. It’s seen as a necessity, something that’s expected among the kids.”

In the Capistrano district, the high school program is on the rebound thanks to an elementary school concept called “block music,” Buffum said. Rather than remove interested children from academic classes to take music, the district has hired music teachers who travel from school to school and when they arrive to teach, “the whole school goes to music class.”

“Block music solves the No. 1 problem of elementary school music,” said Buffum, “and that’s that it eliminates the pullouts of kids from class.”

As a result of block music, he said, “our high school programs are stronger than they’ve ever been.”

Nearly 11 years after Proposition 13, music educators agree that definite patterns of music education--or lack of it--have been established at many schools. And, they say, it is probably unlikely that a decimated program will rebound in the near future. If rebuilding is to occur, they say, it must be done from the bottom up.

“The state education code says that (elementary school) kids will be taught arts and music,” Vaughn said. “Not just aesthetics, but the skills. The problem is that some schools justify what they have by saying that the classroom teacher has them do finger painting and listening to a record. What would happen if you did that sort of thing with English or the language arts or math?

“It’s always difficult, because there’s a kind of crucifix complex in the arts business. You have to know that your programs are always on the chopping block. You learn to tell yourself to forget growth. Just maintain what you’ve got. In this business, to maintain is to gain.”

Still, the fear that The Day the Music Died was approaching seems to have become somewhat less dreadful.

“More parents and teachers and people in the administrations realize that everybody in the world is not going to become a rocket scientist or a computer analyst and that there are these things out there called the fine arts,” said Fred Aratari, the head of Valencia’s music program booster club.

“A kid may not go on to become a professional musician, but it makes him a more well-rounded person. It’s like Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of being famous in life. That’s what it’s like for these kids.”