HS Band Scholarship Signing Day

[The Impaler]

Hey guys,

I'm really excited to be posting this info about something that should get just as much attention in your (and my) local media as athletics:

Today, at Midland HS in Midland, TX, we had our first annual Band Scholarship Signing Day. We had several TV cameras (and parents with cameras) at our school to catch the news. The senior class of our band program has earned (to date) a collective $450, 000 in scholarship money to attend college next year, ranging from our local Midland College, to my alma mater West Texas A&M University, to places like USC, OU, and Arizona State. Our program currently has graduates studying music at Eastman, ASU, CCM, and even a recent graduate of the Curtis Institute, just to name a few.

This celebration of achievement was the result of frustration with our local media for covering even the tiniest athletic scholarship at the tiniest school (not that there's anything wrong with that) without giving the band even the slightest mention of anything. Several of our students earned in excess of $60,000 apiece in scholarship monies.

Hopefully, this is the type of thing that will catch on in many places so that communities can be made aware of the value that a high school music education has to colleges and universities, even to those not studying music. Of our graduating seniors, almost 2/3 of them are not planning to major in music, yet some of them garnered just as much, if not more, scholarship monies than those choosing to make music their major field of study.

Call your local schools, administrations, and media outlets and ask if something like this might be possible. These achievements happen everywhere, all around us, and they are certainly worthy enough to be celebrated just as much as our athletic counterparts.