Before You Enjoy Your Summer, Here Are Some Minor Budget Cuts for Next Year’s High School Music Program

Dear Teachers —

Congrats on such a successful year for the music program. I’ve heard that everyone loved the concerts and the halftime shows. The students are still talking about how much fun they had on the end-of-year trip funded entirely through your candy bar sales. Plus, you tripled the band’s size through your tireless recruiting efforts.

Before you enjoy your well-deserved summer break, though, we need to let you know about next year’s minor budget cuts.

We won’t be able to utilize any undergrad teaching assistants, hire any extra private instructors, or even have volunteers to help the students anymore. If you could spend a few minutes after class and give a handful of individualized lessons every day to help them out, that would be fabulous.

We no longer have any funding to help students that need their instruments repaired. But we did manage to find an old bench and some outdated tools from the auto maintenance class, so you can just perform all the necessary instrumental repairs yourself.

Since the band’s bus had to be sold to fund the football team’s end-of-year bash, it would be great if you could shuttle the students to the district and state music festivals in your 2009 Kia.

We’d also like to keep the choir for next year, even though their rehearsal space will be repurposed as a football hall-of-fame memorabilia room. They can rehearse during the first half of the lunch period in the basement next to the swimming pool. We put up a curtain to lessen the echo and keep the students somewhat dry.

Your office will also need to be used to store the football team’s new state-of-the-art robotic tackling dummies. You can still keep a desk in there, it just needs to be a little smaller. The chair will no longer fit, and while someone was getting rid of it, they broke your laptop.

Unfortunately, your request for more music stands couldn’t be granted. The twelve music stands that you do have must now be shared by our school and the junior high school. Since the stands are stored on a wheeled cart, they can be easily transported between the two schools, which are only five hundred yards apart. Of course, you’ll first need to shovel the sidewalk (maybe with one of the stands?) during the winter months. We also had to eliminate our snow plow budget, except for the football field parking lot.

Speaking of football, can the football halftime shows be even more exciting and extravagant? It would be great if you could have a theme that used many costumes, pyrotechnics, and props, like something straight out of a Jurassic Park movie. We should have some cool stuff left over now that the theater is the coach’s viewing room for game films.

One more thing: I know you like having the students get together a few weeks before school starts back in the fall to work on some marching band drills. You’ll need to find a way to do that and teach driver’s ed at the same time.

Have a great summer!