Good News Bad News

The good news first. We have instrumental music classes in the public schools in Pasadena California. Despite millions of dollars of cuts to everything statewide over the last two years, Pasadena Unified School District, for whom I work, has managed to hang on to what many consider to be a precious component of a child's school life. There was a time, before I started teaching here, when every student from third or 4th grade onward had the opportunity to have a group music lesson twice a week, with instruments provided by the District. The marching band at John Muir High School in 1995,  the year I started, was huge. Probably a hundred kids marched down the aisle of the Pasadena Civic Auditorium on the opening day of school that year to herald the thousands of teachers, support staff and administrators who gathered for what used to be an annual pep rally/state of the district event. That event has gone by the wayside, and John Muir's Marching Band is a shell of its former self, but it still exists. The bad news is that within a couple more years, even that may go the way of the opening-of-school gala.

Since 1995, several elementary schools have closed, due to decreasing enrollment. The cost of living in Pasadena is high. What used to be a suburb of Los Angeles, Pasadena was where people moved to avoid the high prices of living in a large metropolis. But now it is a trendy appendage of the city of angels, with 80 -year-old 2-bedroom, one-bath homes selling for a half million dollars. Many of the people who can afford to buy homes here have some idea that our public schools are rotten, and so send their offspring to the many fine private schools in the vicinity. Consequently, fewer children fill seats in the public schools, which means that federal and state dollars to those schools decrease, which causes this spiral of underfunded schools scaring off possible students because there aren't enough students to pull in the dollars.

Neverthless, through all these changes and all these years, PUSD put Arts in general and Music in particular as a priority in making budgeting decisions. Not a front-and-center kind of priority, but always funding was available for music teachers in numbers enough to cover all the remaining elementary schools, the middle schools and high schools. Music classes dropped to once a week, full-time teachers who had previously covered two schools now covered 5, and money for buying new music and equipment was precious. This is the environment I signed on to in 1995.