On Friday, March 12th, Senator Jeff Klein (D-Bronx/Westchester) joined by New Rochelle Superintendent Richard Organisciak, school officials and students, presented a $100,000 grant to the New Rochelle School District.
The money will be used to fund the expansion of the district’s SmartMusic program, giving elementary students new opportunities to learn how to play a musical instrument and improve their vocal performances.
“Programs like SmartMusic not only enrich children’s lives but enhance their arts education with lessons and skills that bring joy to their day and for some, the building blocks of a future career,” said Klein.
New Rochelle High School launched the SmartMusic program in December 2008. Through performance learning software, students at all skill levels play instruments or sing with professional accompaniments. The program offers a variety of styles for band or string orchestra, brass, percussion, strings or vocal. Teachers assign students different exercises electronically and students complete them either in school or at home.
Currently, the New Rochelle School District offers SmartMusic at its high school and two middle schools. In total, 285 students ranging from ages 11 to 18 participate in the program. Klein’s grant will expand the program into six elementary schools including Columbus, George M. Davis Jr., Jefferson, Trinity, William B. Ward and Daniel Webster Elementary Schools.
The district will also seek licenses for the music writing software program, Finale. The software is used in conjunction with SmartMusic.
“SmartMusic and Finale provide innovative ways to reinforce a student’s musical learning. The features of the program foster individualization–a music student is able to learn at their own pace in their own way. The program has proven to help students learn their music efficiently and accurately. Recent performances at New Rochelle High School clearly indicated that students who had used the program performed their music with confidence and greater consistency. Their improvement can be attributed to more frequent practicing through the use of SmartMusic,” said New Rochelle School District’s Supervisor of Music Marc Schneider.
Let’s see where the money goes
Given the proven disparity in distribution of funds to the middle schools in New Rochelle
(See here: http://www.newrochelletalk.com/node/1476#comment-8258)
I will be interested to see what crumbs will be distributed to Isaac Young Middle School from this grant.
I also agree with the other posters that this is probably not “Free Money” but what Deputy Klein has done here is saddle New Rochelle with a future burden while gaining for himself a great photo-op. When this Karoake style software has to be upgraded, or new computers have to bought to run the software will Deputy Klein be providing that money also?
A $100,000 grant is great,
A $100,000 grant is great, but what are the stings? Not to be pessimistic, but isn’t this new program going to cost a lot of money to run? Money that our cash strapped school district doesn’t really have? Sounds like a fantastic program that maybe my kids will be able to take advantage of, but then again maybe the school district shouldn’t be looking to expand services right now given our current economic realities that we have to learn to do more with less.
Isn’t this one of the
Isn’t this one of the programs you described as the state and feds “force” upon us like the DARE and GREAT programs?
I have no idea, but I’m just
I have no idea, but I’m just pointing out the fact that we can’t afford everything that we want. Somethings just cost too much. If I were to buy everything my kids want at the grocery store, I wouldn’t have any money left to buy the groceries. On the same line of thinking, if I have to spend less on groceries I do. I can’t just decide to buy everything because that not realistically within my budget.
Same should hold true with the school district but it doesn’t. The school district has the ability to raise taxes and spend whatever they want for the most part and its starting to adversly affect people. So if this expanded program that Sen. Klein obtained the $100,000 grant for costs $500,000 to operate annually, then maybe it isn’t such a good thing after all. There’s no such thing as “free”, everything has a cost and we shouldn’t try to avoid it by taking “free” money from the state because it has strings attached that will add to our costs even more.