High school musicals are a huge part of school history, not only because they often involve hundreds of students but also because the performances are spectacular. To learn more about this important aspect of the history of learning, Voxitatis has filed Freedom of Information Act requests with 383 high schools in Illinois for information about musical theater productions during the 2012-2013 school year.
Follow this link to tell us about a school’s musical production in the 2012-2013 school year.
Our organization attempted to contact more than 50 high schools in the fall, but our requests for information were often not answered. For this reason, we avoided any attempt to contact schools informally for the information in the spring and mailed out the FOIA requests this afternoon.
The requests come from our correspondent and researcher, Danielle Heaps, who is working in New York. For more information, schools may contact us at editor@schoolsnapshots.org or by calling (630) 863-5871.
Requests were not sent to schools that didn’t perform a musical in the 2010-2011 school year. Nor were they sent to private high schools, which are not required to respond to FOIA requests. If you know of a school that fits into one of these two categories and did perform a musical this year, please drop us a line by one of the above methods.
Any information obtained will be entered into a database and made available on the Web. It’s our hope that this will serve as a resource for schools next year and in years following. For example, if your high school is putting on Les Misérables in the 2013-2014 school year but you’re short on funds, perhaps a school that performed the musical in the 2012-2013 school year can help you out with a few materials. Or, the other director might share a few ideas about the production.
It’s against our policy to print student names that aren’t already a matter of public record, so we expect schools to redact any student names from the information they supply. The information in our database will include the school’s name and location, the title of the musical performed, and the dates that musical was performed. Once we have the information, we may also search for news coverage of the performances or open up the page for pictures or accounts produced by the school, students, or local community. By federal law, we cannot post videos of the performances, so don’t even try to send those.
All that comes later, but for right now, we’re just going to collect the information about the musicals performed.