This year the Voxitatis team made the following changes to our marching band coverage:
- Partnering with Illinois Marching Online (link) to develop a general survey
- Writing pre-season “trailers” about the performances of bands whose directors responded to our email
- Expanding the sorting and modifying the page layout in our coverage of marching festivals
- Adding a “landing” page for marching band coverage, from which other pages branch
We also allowed readers of our stories to take a survey, telling us what they thought. Although very few people actually wrote any comments in the essay questions on the survey, most respondents filled in grades for our coverage of marching band and told us what they would like to see more of from a list we came up with.
More than 95% of people who took the survey gave us a “B” for overall coverage. We are a little harder on ourselves. We think we deserve a “D” this year, because our coverage has been mostly absent. We have found, through various sources, about 300 high school marching bands in Illinois, and we wrote stories this year about five of them. I consider that below average. The stories themselves might have been well written, but excluding so many bands and so many thousands of marching band students is certainly not what we aim to accomplish.
If you have not already done so, please give us your opinion by taking our coverage survey. It’s completely anonymous, and we appreciate your time in helping us reach our goal of excellence in marching band coverage. The survey is at
www.surveymonkey.com/s/XRMGHCR
There are at least two root causes for our missing coverage on so many bands. First, we don’t have a real presence in Illinois when it comes to marching bands. Yes, we have curriculum experts there, but these people know next to nothing about marching bands, and I would never think of asking them to try to write a story about marching band. I work for the Maryland State Department of Education and spend most of the year in Florida and Texas (next year, I’ll be mostly in Michigan and Florida). This real job of mine sort of gets in the way of my hobby.
Second, we request information from directors every year about their marching band programs, and very few actually respond to questions in writing. On the one day this fall I had to actually call people (I was on a furlough day Sept. 4), I reached a very small number of directors (as expected), left messages for every one of them, and only three out of about 140 that I called actually returned my message. I assume they don’t return my calls because I don’t work for the New York Times (or even a local paper), or because they simply don’t have the time. The latter is more likely, actually, because whatever high school students may think about having a busy schedule, you don’t know the half of it.
There may be a solution to the first cause, which would be for me to hire someone in Illinois to cover marching bands and thus do a far superior job (and a fair one, covering all schools, not just those that do corps-style marching at BOA festivals) than I possibly can. Voxitatis doesn’t sell anything or allow ads on our pages (with limited exceptions), so money might be an issue with this, but please write to me if you think you might have a few hours a week during the 2011 marching season.
Partnership with Illinois Marching Online
I wish I could thank Dan Balash at Illinois Marching Online publicly, for his help in promoting and developing the survey so many people responded to this fall. I would give that part of our coverage a “B” in that the survey allowed parents, directors, students, and fans to send words of encouragement and support to marching bands in Illinois. On the other hand, there were some disagreeable people, who posted votes of disagreement with many, many posts. Some of the posts they disagreed with didn’t even have any content with which they could disagree. Hmm.
When I read about some of the exciting moments, some of the high points of the season, or how the work ethic on the part of student-musicians or staff members or support from parents was just so great this year, it literally brought a tear to my eye several times.
Of all the people who responded, most (about 42%) were students currently in the band, with section leaders and musicians making up most of the student respondents (37% and 47%, respectively). Parents also voiced their support, accounting for about 23 percent of the total respondents. Band alumni took about 14 percent of the surveys, while staff members (certified and otherwise) accounted for about 10 percent of the respondents.
Some good news from the results include the fact that “Support from Parents” and “Attitude of Staff” got very high marks from most people. About 93 percent of people think staff attitudes in Illinois marching bands are “Superior” or “Very Good,” and about 90 percent of people rated parental support as either “Superior” or “Very Good.” In general, then, although music varies, marching varies, and so on, at least we believe you feel well supported and well taught.
If you are interested in seeing some of the comments entered about a specific band, please visit the individual band page by finding it on our master list:
www.schoolsnapshots.org/arts/schoolist.pl
If you would like to take the survey, there is a link on the individual band page that will take you to the survey so you can add your voice to the mix.
The pre-season trailers
The trailer idea came to me last year, as I wrote about every one of the semifinalist bands at the Bands of America Grand National Championships. Oddly enough, the response from directors at these national-class bands was almost unanimous, compared with the very limited response I receive from Illinois band directors. They had their drum majors talk to me in conference call appointments, they sent me essays written by their students, and so on. When I got this great response, I thought it might be a good idea to try it for Illinois bands.
I basically can only come to the Midwest for one festival a year. Last year, I did the Grand Nationals, this year ISU, and next year, I hope to put this task in the hands of another capable individual. Anyway, I appreciate band sites that linked into our coverage with these trailers, including Eureka and Naperville North. A mention in a newsletter or on a Web site helps people find our site, and then, it allows me to see how people are using the site so it can be improved. Once people start using it, it adapts, like in evolution.
As far as our evaluation goes, these trailers were probably better written than many stories about individual bands, because they were well researched. For example, in the Naperville North trailer, we wrote about the use of comedy to portray some serious thematic material and difficult music and marching. That requires just a little bit of background information to put in a proper context, and since the trailers represent writing that is very contextual in nature, I think the individual trailers were well received.
Where I fault our coverage here is that we only did five of them. That’s a problem. So much hard work goes into the performances so many high school marching bands give every fall. They start work in the summer (or in some cases during the spring), and strive to perfect eight minutes of a part of your day for entertainment purposes. They deserve the skills of a good writer, good photographer, or whatever we can provide, to tell their story properly. We have to get to more of them next year — and not just with the trailers, which are really intended to be about what the band is trying to accomplish. We also have to provide good stories during the season about what they are actually accomplishing: the music, the visuals, the effectiveness of their entertainment on the football field.
We have just a few more stories coming this year, including a student essay about her experiences in Bands of America. I hope you’ll watch for it in a couple weeks, along with our follow-up on fine arts in Illinois high schools, including the concert season, the IMEA All-State festival, and the musical theater productions, most of which take place in the spring.
