Downbeat Band Directors Strike Sour Note at Contest

When the second-place award was presented to the marching band from Virginia’s prestigious Thomas Jefferson High School at a statewide competition, band leader Kent Baker didn’t accept it with a song in his heart.

In front of hundreds of students and parents gathered on a high school football field in Virginia Beach, Baker, 31, threw the gleaming trophy into a trash can.

The band’s other director, Phil Simon, 49, began arguing with the judges, saying his musicians deserved first place. After an official from another school retrieved the trophy from the trash, Simon refused to take it.

Both directors were suspended and have apologized to students, parents and school administrators in a series of meetings during the last two weeks. But the Sept. 28 incident is still reverberating, with some parents and officials calling it an example of bad sportsmanship that rivals the case of Roberto Alomar, the Baltimore Orioles baseball player who spit on an umpire.

What’s especially embarrassing, many say, is that the incident involved Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax, a school for academically gifted students that consistently produces more National Merit semifinalists than any other high school in the country.

“I’m personally outraged by it,” said Carol Condit, whose husband is president of the marching band boosters at Thomas Jefferson. “It is inexcusable for any adult to act that way in front of a child. And especially for a teacher at Thomas Jefferson, supposedly a premier school in the U.S.”

Principal Geoffrey Jones, in addition to suspending Baker and Simon, required them to present a plan showing how they would tone down the competitiveness of the school’s marching band program. Their suspensions ended Thursday.