L.A. District to Hire More Music Teachers

The Los Angeles school board voted Monday to hire enough music teachers to offer music instruction at least once a week at every one of the district’s 400 elementary schools.

The district will hire five new teachers this year, and add 16 in the next five years. Now, the district’s music instruction program consists of 73 roving instructors who move among 330 schools, visiting each one day a week.

Some schools are able to hire music teachers to supplement the traveling corps, using money raised through parent and booster clubs. And private organizations, like the Los Angeles Philharmonic, provide extensive, though uneven, help by sending volunteers to many campuses.

“We are very concerned about the schools we cannot reach” with our programs, Hansonia Caldwell, vice president of the Los Angeles Philharmonic board, told the school board members. “We know we cannot be the replacements for a classroom teacher.”

After listening to impassioned speeches by supporters--ranging from a music teacher to actress Nanette Fabray--the school board unanimously agreed to hire the five additional teachers, which will cost more than $200,000 a year.

The plan calls for an additional 11 teachers to be hired by 2002 at an estimated cost of nearly $730,000.

However, the cost could soar much higher as the district strives to address equity concerns raised by board President Jeff Horton, who said music services should be allocated based on enrollment.

Under the new plan, music teachers would visit each school, no matter its size, once a week, meaning many children on the district’s larger campuses would seldom get a music lesson.

“I’m concerned about a situation where a school with 500 students has a day a week and a school with 2,500 has only two days a week, which is not proportional,” Horton said.

Under the formula proposed by Horton, the larger school would get five days of instruction, so each child would spend the same amount of time with a music teacher as a student at the smaller school. School district administrators said they will study ways to make the distribution of music instruction fair, but indicated that any alternative would require more teachers and cost more.