By Bruce Barton
 Photo by Monique Schoenfeld, Town Crier |
Los Altos-based organization has plugged music hole in the classroom
It might be considered ironic that Music For Minors’ success as a non-profit organization has happened amid a flourishing Silicon Valley sensibility that cherishes technical skills and sees little value for the arts.
Founder Grace Johnston of Los Altos, who taught music in the Mountain View School District, recalled speaking before a room of engineers about the importance of music education, only to be met with blank stares.
But time and even science have vindicated Johnston’s beliefs. In recent years, amid discoveries that music can actually improve the brain’s reasoning and problem-solving abilities, she can be excused from an occasional, “I told you so.”
Music For Minors’ benefit gala –Celebrating 25 Years of Bringing Music Into Schools– is scheduled 6:30 p.m. to midnight, Nov. 4, beginning with a cocktail hour, followed by dinner and entertainment at 7:30 p.m. … For more information about the gala or Music For Minors in general, call 941-9130.
While Silicon Valley was changing the world, Music For Minors took on the comparatively modest but important task of resurrecting music education in local schools. Since its founding in 1975, the group has provided an outlet for singing and music appreciation that has been generally missing in state public primary schools for a generation and a half.
Johnston and the rest of the Music For Minors cast plan on celebrating and building on their success at a 25th anniversary gala event Nov. 4 at the University Club in Palo Alto.
The South Bay organization claims about 110 docents, trained volunteers who spend a minimum of one-half hour a week in classrooms teaching the values of melody and rhythm and opening a songbook of American and international folk music.
“Our original goal was to nurture in children a love of music,” Johnston said. “The elements of music we wanted to impart would be developed through their enjoyment and participation.”
There have been positive changes for the organization that started in Los Altos and has since expanded efforts throughout the South and East Bay. Over the past four years, the program, under the direction of executive director Candy Pelissero, has grown considerably, taking on an ambitious after-school program, presiding over a first-ever San Jose Symphony Youth Orchestra concert with performer Charlotte Diamond earlier this year, and organizing two children’s music festivals. This past week, organizers moved into a new office on Second Street in Los Altos; plans to add more staff are under way. This is all possible because last year the organization raised $48,000 in individual donations, a 400 percent increase over the year before. The 2001 goal is $100,000.
The main reason for Music For Minors’ recent growth spurt has been exposure. The benefit concerts with such children’s stars as Diamond and Tom Chapin have helped, but Pelissero also pushed for more publicity and aggressively pursued grant funding.
Collaboration also has been a key ingredient in the organization’s success, according to Johnston and Pelissero. The organization started with a connection between the Junior League of Palo Alto, the American Association of University Women and the Los Altos School District. Its after-school program, begun last year, is a collaborative effort that involves the city of San Jose, San Jose school districts and the YMCA. Schola Cantorum is joining them next spring in a “Voices In Harmony” concert involving the adult and children’s choirs, and Los Altos School District children.
“Collaboration is really the wave of the future for Music For Minors,” Pelissero said.
Music For Minors has always offered a comprehensive, sequential program involving a docent teaching in the classroom. But the after-school program, targeting at-risk kids in San Jose schools, called for classroom management skills. The docents found that one teacher in a classroom of tired, rambunctious kids wasn’t going to work. So organizers refined the program and enlisted aides to keep order while the teacher taught music. It’s working like a charm.
“Many of them (children) are non-English speaking, but music is an international language,” Pelissero said.
The program was introduced this year at Slater and Landels schools in Mountain View.
“Not only have we increased the number of children served, but we’ve gone into geographic areas we never had been involved in before,” Pelissero said.
Pelissero pushed for the after-school program. “My former background was in child-abuse prevention,” she said. “I felt that music could get children to focus on something else other than getting into trouble.”
The major challenge during her four years with the organization has been getting enough docents to cover the increase in classrooms that have come about through the state’s class-size reductions.
“When reducing the numbers (of students), it put more pressure on docents to do more classes,” Pelissero said. “We had one man at Gardner Academy who did 13 classes.”
One way of covering as many students as possible was to develop a roving docents program. People with specialized skills, such as playing the marimba or Celtic harp, would visit various classes.
Attracting docents in the future will be another big challenge, in an organization comprising mostly women.
“With a change in work patterns now, more women are working, which puts a strain on the volunteer base,” Pelissero said.
In addition to the docents, the organization currently has 20 other volunteers serving 41 schools, 322 classes and 6,433 students in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties. A separate group, Music For Minors II, operates out of the Fremont area.
It’s onward and upward for the harmonious organization. Organizers plan to hire new staff in the coming year, including a full-time planning director and two part-time program managers.
Pelissero, who is leaving the organization in November, said she takes satisfaction in “watching it go from a small organization focused on one program to one with a broad vision, and showing there were many other avenues we could get involved in.”
It started in 1973 when Johnston, bothered by cutbacks to music education, persuaded the Junior League of Palo Alto to form a committee geared to getting music back in the schools. At the same time, the AAUW was studying the problem. Concurrently, Bob Reasoner, then an assistant superintendent in the Los Altos School District, wanted to form a music program. The forces converged, and the organization started in 1975 with a 9-by-7 foot office at Hillview School.
“We started with 28 docents in Los Altos and Menlo Park,” Johnston recalled. She was executive director from 1977 to 1981. By the time she left, Music For Minors had 100 docents.
“I was really a CEO then,” Johnston said. “I did all the operations, did all the interviewing, started the curriculum - I did it long-distance with Dr. Genevieve Fitzmaurice, who was at the University of Arizona at the time.” She recalled gatherings in members’ living rooms with tape recorders running and people rattling off song titles for inclusion in the program.
“It was quite interesting and very rewarding,” Johnston said of the early days.
Johnston also started the fund-raising arm of Music For Minors, which she called People of Note. A friend throughout the years has been the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, headquartered in Los Altos, which consistently has given funding for Music For Minors. More sponsors have come on board in recent years, including the Wheatley Foundation, Western Digital Corp., the Layne and Ruth Bradford Foundation, the Junior League of San Jose and Gymboree. De Anza and Foothill colleges also have been supportive.
Rachel Wagner, who was in the first class of docents, said she joined Music For Minors because “I always loved music and felt the children were being shortchanged by not having music instruction in the schools.” She said the purpose of the program was not so much having sing-alongs as it was encouraging children to develop their own talents.
As for the Minors’ impact, Wagner pointed to a high school music teacher who felt students who learned from the docents went on to become better music students. “They had better listening skills,” she said.
Cathy Combs of Los Altos Hills, who first joined in 1988 when her son was in third grade, said she was immediately stricken with “the bug” of docent volunteering. She has noticed a more professional, organized approach to the way Music For Minors operates its programs.
“We’ve tightened our ship and expanded into the community to find more people on our board,” said Combs, herself a member of the board of directors and a past president.
She applauded the new after-school program, and noted that the overall program now runs all year long. Combs also pointed to more grandparents and men volunteering as docents, and docent classes being taught in San Mateo as well as Los Altos.
“The board has become really proactive,” she said. “We’re trying to change with the times.”
The overall goal, however, is still the same.
“We want the districts to provide the music,” Combs said. “We’re not going to quit until all the classes have it.”
Johnston has seen progress, but local schools in general still lack the music education programs she would like to see. “I would like Music For Minors to collaborate with the schools in putting back music in the classrooms,” she said.
“In a way, I would like to see us put ourselves out of business.”
