The Boone Community School District of Boone Iowa has a robust orchestra program that has existed for a century, an extraordinary achievement in any district. And now the school board has elected to end that program.
Boone is located north of Des Moines about a 45 minute drive. According to the 2020 census, there are a little over 12,000 people there, a median income of around $62K. The Lincoln Highway used to run through town until new four lanes bypassed the town in the 1960s. They got their start from coal mining in the post-Civil War days.
Iowa is a state with a rich musical heritage. It's no coincidence that Music Man's Professor Harold Hill ends up trying to start a boys band in River City, Iowa; Meredith Wilson, creator of The Music Man was born in Mason City, Iowa in 1902 and came of age when town bands were becoming all the rage. Iowa became famous in music circles for passing the Iowa Band Law, a state law that allowed cities to levy a tax to help fund a town band.
That law was passed in 1921, a few years before Boone launched its orchestra program.
The program is remarkably robust for a smallish town district. There have been multiple ensembles at the high school, and a middle school orchestra, which is... brave. My rough estimate is that at maybe 20% of the middle and high school population takes part. I found some clips of the orchestra on Youtube (attached below) and the group plays a heartening assortment, from Verdi through Lady Gaga. It's a perfect assortment for a school music program--they get both the education of learning about the classics as well as the joy of making music that they know.
And they sound good. Video clips can't capture the rich, luxurious sound of live strings (if you have never heard strings live, you just don't know, and I say that as a member of the brass instrument club, a group not known for our love of string players). But video clips can capture the painful noise of a bunch of string players scratching away in an out of tune clump-- and that sound is not in evidence here.
As someone at last week's board meeting noted, Boone has been justly proud of having one of the last remaining orchestra programs in the state. Double points for a program that is actually good.
But as a handout at the meeting noted, orchestra is not required by the state, and the district was looking to make some budget cuts.
Several hundred folks showed up to talk about the proposed cuts, and Ames Tribune reporter Celia Brocker didn't hear much in the extended comment period that favored cutting orchestra:
“The Boone school administration has supported the orchestra program through the Great Depression in the 1930s, the 2008 Great Recession and most recently the pandemic,” [Boone alumna Cara] Stone said. “I know the landscape has changed a lot, but don’t make cuts to the orchestra or choir program. These are programs that make students want to come to school.”
The board was looking to cut enough to cover $665,000. One member noted that cutting coaches would require cuts of 8 to 10 sports positions to get the cost of a full-time orchestra teacher (as with many districts, Boone pays its coaches a small stipend rather than a full salary).
Why is the district scrambling for that much money? The district points to a couple of factors. One is Iowa's anemic state support for school districts. Boone's business director Paula Newbold points out that districts used to get a 4% raise in state funding every year, but for the past decade the annual increase is more like 2%. Unless Iowa lives in some special zone of the nation, that means state support, a major source of revenue for Iowa districts, has been steadily losing ground to inflation.
Boone also has some declining enrollment numbers, though the cited decline of 630 students over the last 25 years is not exactly falling-off-a-cliff dramatic. Iowa has universal taxpayer-funded school vouchers, which are no help for either enrollment or funding; ironically, that has meant an influx of money for private schools, including those who have raised tuition to take advantage of the new taxpayer subsidy.
Iowa Senator Jesse Green, who is from Boone, says on Facebook that Boone's troubles are totally not the legislatures fault and Boone's "poor budgeting and spending habits." He points to a graph that shows Boone raising property taxes while conveniently ignoring that rate of state subsidy support (pro tip: when your state support isn't keeping up with inflation, your alternative is to raise property taxes).
Boone will, at least for now, keep other pieces of its instrumental music and arts programs, but it's losing health, PE, and some other positions. And it's losing a program that made it something special among other Iowan and American schools. I'm not going to make the old argument that music programs raise test scores, because I think music is more important than that (get the whole argument here) and is a critical piece of learning about humaning. Boone schools are going to be less than they were with the loss of this program.
We are going to have lots of these conversations in the years ahead. The young human population is dipping. Education privatization programs will spread already-inadequate funding over multiple school systems, like trying to cover six beds with one threadbare blanket. Districts are going to lose programs, staff, buildings, and I'm not sure we're really prepared for the difficult discussions about real causes and true solutions. The last time we had a chance to really talk about what education is for and what priorities would be was the days of Covid onslaught, and as a nation we pretty much punted that one, so I'm not optimistic about what comes next.
But in the meantime, Boone schools, city, and students are losing something that is distinctive, unique and special, which means we all are. Here's hoping things get better there soon.
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