Group to Press for During-School Music Classes

The nonprofit Friends of School Music will ask the Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified School District on Monday to reinstate instrumental music classes during the school day at the district’s eight elementary schools.

The group is conducting a letter-writing campaign, warning that a Board of Education decision to provide instrumental music classes after school, rather than during the school day, would cause “far-reaching damage” to the district’s music program. Parents are being asked to write to the board to express their views on the issue.

Members will press for reinstatement of school-day music classes when the Board of Education meets Monday to adopt its tentative budget for 1989-90. The 7 p.m. board meeting will be at the district’s Valmonte Administration Center, 3801 Via La Selva, Palos Verdes Estates. The board is not expected to adopt a final budget until September.

The Board of Education decided earlier this year to provide after-school instrumental music instruction for educational and budgetary reasons, district officials said Friday. The district expects to save at least $65,000 next year in salaries and other costs by offering classes after school.

The after-school program will start in the fall at two locations--the former Pedregal Elementary School on the west side of the peninsula, and either Mira Catalina Elementary School or Miraleste High School on the east side, according to district spokeswoman Nancy Mahr. In addition, ensemble playing will occasionally be offered after school at all eight elementary schools, she said.

Brigitte Schuegraf, president of Friends of School Music, said that participation would drop from current levels of 500 to 550 students if the instruction was after school, when music would have to compete with other extracurricular activities.

An after-school program, especially one not at the student’s home school, “would reduce enrollment so drastically that the secondary-level music classes would eventually face extinction,” she said.

“Stop a moment and picture future school and community events--football games, musicals, parades, band and orchestra concerts--without a band or orchestra,” she said. Cutting back on elementary music instruction would be “like cutting a tree off at the roots,” she said.

Mahr said that until now, the district has offered a “pull-out” music program at all eight elementary schools. Under the program, students have been taken out of their regular classes for music lessons at their home school.

Wherever possible, students are removed from non-academic classes such as physical education, Mahr said. But sometimes, because two teachers must divide their time among eight schools, students must be taken out of academic classes, she said.

Board members and state officials are concerned that students may be missing required studies, Mahr said. “Classroom pull-out is a very major issue” among educators, she said.

Mahr noted that music is only one of many school programs affected by a continuing decrease in state funding. District enrollment has declined from about 18,000 in 1973 to 9,320 today, and state funding to the district has diminished accordingly, she said.

In the 1989-90 fiscal year, the district expects to receive $30.6 million from state and local sources, compared to $31.8 million for 1988-89, Mahr said.

Partly because of the revenue decline, the district had to slash $1.1 million from its list of desired programs for the 1989-90 school year, she said.

Next year’s after-school program, which will be paid for by the district, is expected to cost about $36,000, compared to $101,000 for the current program, Mahr said.

A district survey showed that about 250 families would be interested in participating in an after-school program, she said.

But Friends of School Music and other music organizations contend that after-school programs do not attract enough attendance to succeed in the long run.

“It has been our observation over the years that music programs offered before and after the school day plainly do not work,” said Wayne W. Nelson, president of the Southern California School Band and Orchestra Assn., in a letter to the district.

“This type of ‘extra’ time instruction becomes one of elitism, whereby those who can afford the transportation benefit for a while, but the inconvenience of early/late pickups soon causes parents and students to drop out. . . .”

Six members of the South Bay branch of the Music Teachers’ Assn. said in their letter that programs in districts that have tried the before- and after-school approach have failed “after about one year.” In addition, they questioned why music should be assigned a secondary status: “Should it not be welcomed into the curriculum, rather than (being) banned to the unofficial, unacknowledged, unimportant non-school times as now planned?”

Schuegraf and the Friends group also criticized the new after-school program because it would use non-credentialed teachers rather than credentialed teachers from the district.

District officials said the teachers--professional musicians and music teachers from the South Bay Conservatory, a private school in Rancho Palos Verdes--are qualified. They simply don’t have a teaching credential for public schools, Mahr said.

The Friends organization, which since its founding in 1979 has donated $180,000 to the district, has helped pay for elementary instrumental music classes in the district for the past four years. The group also sponsors the Palos Verdes Elementary Honors Orchestra.