Kansas marching bands, choir and orchestra seeing lower participation

EMPORIA — It was hot, rainy, and stuffy — Kansas, in all its early August misery — and still, there was no place Cass Samples would have rather been than on the Emporia High School turf football field.

Ever since the junior joined band in sixth grade, she'd fallen in love with music and performing it, and she couldn't get enough. At Emporia High, Samples was on the field as one the marching band's new drum majors, but she'll also be a part of the school's orchestra and choir ensembles, as well as theater.

Performance arts, for Samples, were a lifeline through a few otherwise difficult years of COVID-era schooling.

"Without performing arts, where would we be without music, movies or television?" Samples said, at the start of the marching band's annual pre-semester training camp. "Music, for me, has always been a part of my life, and I don’t know where I’d be without it, and I know that’s the same for many people."

She just wishes more of her fellow students and others around the state got to experience the same feeling of community she has in Emporia High's ensembles.

While other Kansas high school activities, such as athletics, have mostly rebounded from a pandemic lull in participation rates, performance arts — including band, choir and orchestra — have had a much slower recovery.

Between fall 2017 and fall 2022, the number of Kansas high school students participating in band, orchestra and vocal music dropped 24.8% to just under 31,000, according to data collected by the Kansas State High School Activities Association.

Choir participation, in particular, dropped nearly 30% to 13,314 students, while band and orchestra participation fell to 13,496 (down 22.2%) and 4,070 (down 16.2%) students respectively.

Music teachers and directors are chalking up much of the decline to a lost class of students that either never got started in music classes in middle school or lost interest when music classes had to be held remotely during that first year of pandemic-era education.

"It seems like it was just one year, but what happens, particularly in a band program, they have that opportunity to start in either fifth or seventh grade," said Jamie Minneman, president of the Kansas Music Educators Association. "If that was the year you were in fifth grade, you didn’t get started. You’re missing that whole year of students who didn’t get started, or in my case, I had some students even in my small school who thought it was too hard to wear a mask and not get to play too much.

"Once you lose them, it’s hard to get them to come back," Minneman added. "People feel like they got too far behind and can’t catch up, and I feel that’s where we lost some kids. That’s just now beginning to show up, and we’re seeing that drop-off."

Performance arts classes were some of the first to enact strict social distancing and COVID mitigation measures, said Craig Manteuffel, assistant director of fine arts and spirit for KSHSAA.

One of the biggest and earliest harbingers of the pandemic's deadly toll was in March 2020, when a Washington state adult choir rehearsed not knowing that someone was infected with one of the first cases of COVID in the U.S. Of the 61-person choir, 32 people were later confirmed to have been infected, with three becoming hospitalized and two dying.

That led to a lot of hesitation among music programs in the first few months of COVID-era schooling. The National Federation of High Schools National Music Education Committee, which Manteuffel chairs, used an aerosol study to issue guidelines to help schools reduce or eliminate the spread of the virus. Those included strict limits on the amount of rehearsal time, covers for wind instruments and rehearsing remotely when possible.

"Things could have been worse if that aerosol study had not helped schools as fast as it did," Manteuffel said.

An unintended consequence of the measures, though, was that many students found it difficult or impossible to continue on with their music learning, especially when many of them were barely getting into the basics. Comparatively, other activities, like sports, could continue without as many restrictions.

"We had basically a year and a half of not practicing together, and literally, it was like muscle atrophy for some of the students in not playing their trumpets or saxophones," said Glenn Woolard, head band director at Emporia High School. "It took a bigger toll than we thought it would, and it’s been a lot of work to rebuild those ‘muscles’ in the kids and get their playing chops back up."

Although most COVID restrictions have been relaxed or eliminated, Kansas music programs have still been grappling with what has essentially been a lost generation of high school musicians.

Minneman, the KMEA president, and other music educators expect the dip in participation rates to eventually recover, if more slowly.

"I think you’ll see the turnaround in just a few years," she said. "It’s an eight-year process (from beginning to graduation), and we’re hearing great things out of middle school. The only data we can definitively see right now are for high school participation, but we aren’t seeing fifth-grade numbers, which sound like they’re better than ever."

In the meantime, band, orchestra and choir directors are focusing their efforts on convincing middle school students that music is something they can start and enjoy throughout their school careers and later on in life.

Grant Perkins, the assistant band director at Emporia High and band teacher at Emporia Middle School, said it's been difficult getting his younger students to engage with school, let alone something more time intensive like band.

"A lot of the students have gotten into mindset that it’s OK to just do your homework and not commit to any other organizations," he said. "We lost that (during COVID) — that sense of camaraderie and socialization. A lot of my students, at the middle school level, they have a hard time opening up and talking with each other."

"That’s the hardest part," Minneman said. "It’s delayed gratification. That’s the one thing that today’s kids struggle with the most. They can have everything and all answers at their fingertips on the phone. Music doesn’t quite work that way. It’s a long process. ... But that teaches a valuable life lesson that anything worth doing is worth taking the time and effort to learn and grow."

One strategy that Kansas music directors are taking is emphasizing that while music participation requires a lot of perseverance and hard work, they can also be fun, Minneman said. Many are highlighting the perks of performing, like getting to play fun music and traveling to perform, sometimes to places like Disneyland.

At Emporia High, the marching band is eschewing classics like John Philip Sousa standards in favor of more popular contemporary music, such as songs by Lil Nas X, Olivia Rodrigo and Dua Lip, in its shows this year, said Woolard, the band director.

"When you’re trying to rebuild that intrinsic value of performing, you need to go to music the students know," he said. "It's pop music, that the kids can learn pretty quickly but still challenges them, and that the audience will eat right up.

"We keep telling the kids, it’s good to have fun, but it’s more fun to be good," Woolard continued. "We’ve been saying that for years, and it’s been reminding them that being a part of a large ensemble is such a good feeling, especially when it all comes together. It’s so satisfying putting something like that on for an audience, and getting that feeling is so rewarding."

The same apathy that has kept some students from joining music groups these past few years is also the same reason why many of them would benefit the most from participation, Minneman said.

"If anything good came from COVID, we learned how our music departments are providing that social-emotional learning on a daily basis, and students really missed that," Minneman said. "As we become more aware of students’ needs on social-emotional learning and well-roundedness and community, I think bands, choirs and orchestras are going to become more important."

Among the Emporia High band, one part is creating a fun atmosphere to draw students in, but more importantly, it's about supporting a group of students that can create that fun atmosphere in the first place, Woolard said.

"It's about getting back to family atmosphere of a band," the band director said. "Everyone supporting everyone. It can pretty easily fall into super competitive and super combative between sections, but we’ve put a big focus on shifting the vibe back to having fun and getting better. We all have to be in this together."

While Cass Samples, the junior student, worries about doing a good job in her first marching season as drum major, she's not as worried about the future of the band.

"I think numbers will continue to rise, as long as we continue pushing for the arts to be recognized, and that we emphasize that we are as important as other subjects," Samples said. "People will realize that performance arts aren’t just some geeky, nerdy thing that people only really do in high school movies.

"It’s a legitimate activity, and it’s pretty cool to be a part of a big group of students."

Rafael Garcia is an education reporter for the Topeka Capital-Journal. He can be reached at [email protected] or by phone at ‪785-289-5325. Follow him on Twitter at @byRafaelGarcia.