Music Lovers Alarmed by School Cuts : Funding: A tight new budget means the death of instrumental programs in San Diego’s elementary schools. Music advocates call it a tragedy.

Music teachers statewide are celebrating March as “Music in Our Schools” month, but last week’s budget proposal by the San Diego Unified School District gives little cause for celebration in the local music community.

The district’s proposed 1991-92 budget would eliminate the entire instrumental music program in elementary schools. Removing these 16 teaching positions would save $704,000 of the $37 million the district needs to trim from its budget next year.

“It would be a rank tragedy for this program to go down the tubes for such a minimal investment,” Phillip Smith, principal of Hickman Elementary School in Mira Mesa, said in a phone interview. “Of about 5,000 teaching posts, the 16 instrumental instructors represent a modest investment that enriches the spectrum of academic offerings. Music instruction develops leadership and self-confidence as nothing else does for elementary students.”

After a decade of rebuilding the elementary instrumental music programs in the San Diego district, music advocates are both stunned and frustrated by the sweeping proposal from the district’s budget planning committee.

“Our program is just coming back,” said Ann Marie Haney, president of the Community Council for Music in the Schools. Haney explained her group’s position before the California Music Educator Assn.’s annual awards ceremony Tuesday night in the UC San Diego Faculty Club. Judith Endeman, assistant superintendent of the Ramona Unified School District, was feted as administrator of the year at the event, which honors school administrators who support music programs.

Between performances by four well-trained student ensembles, the table talk among attendees focused on the district’s proposed budget cuts to music instruction.

“We’ve come a long way since 1982, when we had been cut back to a mere five elementary instrumental instructors in the entire district,” Haney said. “It was the board of education that put instrumental teachers back into the program with the goal of making instrumental instruction available in every elementary school in the district.”

Kay Wagner, the San Diego district’s visual and performing arts program manager, outlined the recent history of the instrumental program on her way into the Tuesday meeting. She said that the board of education had adopted a three-year plan in July, 1988, to add five instrumental instructors each year to make either band or orchestra instruction available in all 108 schools of the district. Now, about 80 schools offer band or orchestra to fourth- through sixth-grade students. (That plan, however, was never fully implemented. The district could only afford to add two instructors last year.)

“The reason for concentrating on elementary instrumental programs is because they are integral for the district’s long-term music program,” Wagner explained. “We know that junior high and senior high programs cannot survive without feeding music students from the elementary schools. We’ve already experienced this in the 1980s, which is why the board reinstated instrumental instruction in its 1988 policy. At the moment, we’re just trying to make up for cuts made years ago.”

When Smith spoke to The Times, he noted that music programs appear to be the regular sacrificial lamb when budget emergencies occur.

“In the 20 years I have been in this district, such a budget slash to instrumental music programs has occurred three or four times.”

Dean Hickman, Mira Mesa High School’s band director, who also attended Tuesday’s event, explained why the fourth grade is the ideal age to start pupils on instruments.

“If we wait until the seventh grade, the pressures of additional class requirements and students’ nascent interest in the opposite sex makes instrumental instruction very difficult. Fourth-grade students are also more patient in those first two years, when their instruments don’t make a particularly pleasant sound. They’re not as self-critical as junior high students.”

Hickman added that, to develop a solid band program, he expects his incoming band students to have had five years’ instruction, two in elementary school and three in junior high.

Music-education advocates have spent the last decade fighting the “back to the basics” movement that has emphasized core curriculum studies such as math and reading, as well as the perception that music and the arts are supplemental to basic education.

“Student success is more than doing well in science and math,” said Jean Taylor, president of San Diego Unified PTA Council, who represented her organization at the Tuesday function. “We have a total commitment to what the child needs, including physical education, music and art. We are not satisfied with one in front of the other or one in place of the other. PTA advocates that. It’s scary for me that kids will not have what they need.”

In her terse acceptance speech at the close of the music educator’s meeting, Endeman summed up the credo of the music advocates in attendance.

“Education is not an education without music and art.”