Last Thursday evening, just as Oklahoma State was cruising to a 63-51 victory over Pittsburgh on the way to the Final Four, and as the honorable Avalanche were having an off-night against the cruel, godless Red Wings, thirty-some-odd parents gathered in a high school cafeteria to decide the winner of a different kind of competition.
Smoky Hill High School in Aurora, Colorado -- my high school, the second biggest high school in the state and one of six high schools in the wealthiest school district in the state -- had decided to pull out of competitive marching band.
Though the marching band will still perform at halftime at football games and the occasional school festivity, Smoky Hill will not enter the district qualifying competition for the state tournament.
At a school where the football team is, let's just say, basically non-competitive itself (during each of my four years, they lost the homecoming game by at least 40 points), pulling out of the state marching band competition is huge. This past year, 98 students were in the marching band out of 171 students in all band programs.
After the spring concert band, symphonic band, and wind symphony concert that Thursday night, the school's principal, Jeannine Brown, and the band director, Marty Krusniak, organized a meeting with the band members' parents to discuss the plans for next year.
Prior to the meeting, Krusniak had distributed a position paper to his students outlining the evidence to support his plan. In the paper, he said the majority of the band program's budget was going to support only a select group of band students -- those in the marching band.
He said the money would be better spent on updating the school's instruments, buying music technology computer stations, and improving the school's musical facilities. This, he said, would better benefit the band students who were not in marching band and the other students at the school in other music programs.
In addition, the position paper lambasted the state marching competition as unfair and biased toward schools with higher budgets that are able to spend more on instruction and choreography. Another complaint was that the competition places no limit on the number of students allowed to be in a marching band.
Krusniak blamed the system for the Smoky Hill marching band's weak finishes in competitions in the past few years.
But when parents arrived at the Thursday concert, they were presented with a second position paper -- this one by parents who were circulating a petition to save competitive marching band.
The dissenting paper blamed the school for not requiring marching band members to engage in fundraising to help keep the marching band financially independent of the school. It also cited examples of small marching bands with small budgets performing well at the state competition.
So when parents and school administrators filed into the cafeteria following the wind symphony's rendition of movements one and three of Gustav Holst's "First Suite in Eb, op. 28, no. 1," every able-bodied Auroran expected a showdown reminiscent of Neo and Agent Smith.
"What we're telling our kids is, 'We can't win so we quit,'" Band Parents Association President Kathy Ambrose said.
Krusniak fired back: "I made the decision based on sound principles of music education." He said with President George W. Bush's "No Child Left Behind" program, he has to meet achievement standards for all of his band students, and that focusing on marching band would detract from this.
"We are not meeting those standards now," he said. "It borders on educational malpractice."
Moni Gonsalves, another parent, turned her sights directly on Krusniak. "We have smaller bands that are beating us, so it's not the size of the band, it's the way they are taught." She continued, "It's not the money, it's the time, it's the commitment."
Brown tried to take some of the heat off Krusniak. "My intention is not to take that venue away, but to revise it," she said.
The main problem parents identified, though, is that they don't see the light at the end of the tunnel -- they don't know where Brown and Krusniak's revision will take them and their children.
The parents, who weren't consulted on the school's decision ahead of time, said their kids couldn't commit to non-competitive marching band before they knew what non-competitive marching band was. They asked Krusniak to provide a list of possibilities for non-competitive performances, such as local parades.
They were rebuffed. In a Catch-22 where in the end, the only losers will be the kids, Krusniak said he couldn't come up with possibilities until he knew how many students he would have. "I do not have those answers now," he said.
But the decision is made. The school has committed to a year trial-run of non-competitive marching band, whatever that may be.
A school with 2,800 students, a school that has won state titles in soccer, baseball, cross-country, and volleyball in the past five years, a school that sends its girls tennis team out every spring with brand new fleece pullovers, knowing none of the girls will qualify for the state tournament, is canceling its competitive marching band.
What it comes down to in the end is a question of priorities. Rather than give the marching band competitive status on par with any of the sports teams or academic competition clubs, the school has placed the marching band solely in the grasp of the fine arts world, devoid of the competition most kids in band don't get any place else.
Laying the foundation for music education at the school for the next several decades is indisputably essential, but to do so at the expense of current students, without mandating fundraising, without consulting the parents to come up with a creative solution, is unforgivable.
In sports, team management must often decide which year to scrap the roster and rebuild. Smoky Hill High School just chose to scrap the franchise.
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