12/25/00- Updated 01:29 PM ET
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Taken from the Friday, November 24, 2000 Edition of the Daily News:
EFFORTS OF NOTE
Schools struggle to keep bands marching
By Erik Nelson
Staff Writer
CANOGA PARK - Despite a cracked drum, dented sousaphone and a saxophone
strapped and taped together, the Canoga Park High School band marched to
second place in the Los Angeles Unified School District marching band
championship.
Their safety-pinned uniforms and decades-old instruments are
emblematic of the cleft that separates well-to-do high school bands from
those like Canoga Park's. Music directors across the region cheer the
growing popularity of school music curricula, but say budgets aren't
keeping up and decades-old instruments are falling flat.
"It's kind of discouraging to compete against schools that
have better equipment," said Canoga Park drum major Jose Morales, a
junior.
Shortly before the Los Angeles City Championship last
Saturday, the marching band competed in a regional contest that pitted
them against Nordhoff High School in Ojai.
Canoga Park music director Richard Kravachak and Nordhoff
director Bill Wagner compared notes.
Nordhoff gets between $5,000 and $10,000 a year for instrument
repairs and replacement, while Canoga Park has to make do with its
"instructional materials" budget of $300 to $500 a year. Boosters raise
other funds for operating expenses, such as travel, uniforms and
entrance fees. This year, that's less than $6,000 for Canoga Park and
around $45,000 for Nordhoff.
The difference is made up by boosters relying on the
generosity of the schools communities, and by donations expected from
each band member.
At Granada Hills High School, which at 170 members has the
LAUSD's largest marching band, members donate $150 each.
"The secret is partly that some of our kids come from a very
affluent area, like Porter Ranch," said band director Al Nelson, who
also gives much credit to the dedication of parent boosters whose annual
contributions he declined to disclose. But then the school goes to
regional contests where "we're competing with high schools that are
spending between $100,000 and $500,000 a year."
Bridging the income gap at schools like Canoga Park, where most students
qualify for subsidized lunches, sometimes requires assistance from the
local construction site.
Three weeks ago, one of the hardened steel brackets holding a
four-drum set to a fiberglass harness broke just before a performance.
Band members instinctively called for senior Oscar Cordova,
aka "Mr. Fix It," and senior John Phu, alias "The handyman."
The pair consulted with construction workers for something similar, and
they were given a length of steel rebar, which is normally used to
reinforce concrete.
"We put it in a vise, and John and I put a pipe on it to bent
it," Oscar explained. After bending progressively thicker lengths of
rebar, grinding down their ends to fit in the bracket, not to mention
several bloodied knuckles, the two fashioned two crude replacement bars.
DRUMS FIT RIGHT IN
The drums fit right in with the rest of the band instruments,
which include a bass drum whose rim had snapped during practice the
night before the Nov. 18 city championship, jury-rigged with two screws
and a metal strap. There's also a 25-year-old baritone saxophone, some
of its keys immobilized with plastic cable ties and sealed with black
electrical tape to prevent air from leaking.
Doesn't that prevent all the valves from opening?
"We just skip the notes," explained Oscar.
"It can't play anything lower than a B because the pads can't
seal," he said, pointing to a tone-hole socket covered by a misshapen
gasket the color of dried blood.
It would take about $70,000 to replace past-their-prime
instruments - one saxophone is 50 years old - Kravchak estimates.
And that's on the low end compared with the wish lists of many
schools in low-income area where parents can't afford to rent or buy
instruments and boosters can't come up with the $5,000 it costs to buy a
new tuba.
And repairing instruments can also be costly.
"We have a $600 repair budget," said Craig Kupka, band leader
at Hoover High School in Glendale, which is also mostly lower-income.
"If you have a 25-year-old sax that needs to be reconditioned, that's
going to cost you $300 to $400, so the repair budget doesn't go very
far."
In the LAUSD, it helps that there's a free Musical Instrument
Repair Shop with 19 technicians to service the district's 88,000
instruments. The shop inspects and sterilizes 20,000 elementary
instruments and 5,000 middle and high school instruments annually,
according to director Stephen Riccobono.
But band directors complain of excessive waiting periods and the
"recycling" for parts of instruments deemed too costly to fix.
At San Fernando High, which beat Canoga Park in Division 2 in
the city championship, band director Roger Fletcher said it would take
about $120,000 to replace worn-out instruments and allow more musicians
to play for the fast-growing school.
"Last year, we were teaching a beginning instates class and
the one main band class, and we didn't have enough to really service the
beginning instruments class, " Fletcher explained. This year, there is
no beginner class.
'TERRIBLE SITUATION'
"That's a terrible situation to be in," said Wagner, who like
many school music advocates noted research that has shown far-reaching
benefits from school music programs. "New instruments excite students
about performing and being in school."
That belief has spawned a number of charity efforts to help
disadvantaged schools replace instruments, said Don Doyle, director of
the LAUSD's Division of Visual and Performing Arts, who acknowledges
that the instrument/income divide is "always the case, when you consider
that we're an urban, basically low socioeconomic district."
Sherman Oaks-0based Mr. Holland's Opus Foundation was started
by Michael Kamen, who wrote the score for the movie of the same name and
many others.
The nonprofit's executive director, Felice Mancini, daughter
of legendary composer Henry Mancini, praises the LAUSD's music program
for its commitment to getting instruments even to elementary school
children.
She added, however, that "they have more and more kids, but
they don't have enough instruments available, so they're turning kids
away."
The foundation is trying to help schools across the nation
with $500,000 budget - roughly equal to the LAUSD's new instrument
budget - while the laud alone needs to replace about $3.5 million worth
of instruments.
Cable music network VH-1 gives the district about $200,000 a
year for new elementary schools, and piano giant Kawai Corp. this
launched a $1 million nationwide school giving program that included new
grand pianos for Van Nuys High School and Millikan Middle School in
Sherman Oaks.
Although more that half of Hoover's students are considered
disadvantaged, it has the good fortune to be in the Glendale Unified
School District, which supplied the school with $30,000 for new
instruments three years ago.
But Kupka said it will take at least five more years like that
to bring his program up to date. He's reached out to the Mr. Holland's
Opus Foundation, but "we can't even get our phone calls returned."
Mancini said, "to have a budget of $30,000, that's
out-standing. We tend to want to help out the ones that are a little
more desperate."
