CMS loses funding for popular music programs. To keep them, parents may need to pay up

For more than two decades, thousands of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools students enjoyed performing in honors music programs alongside other teens from across the county.

But CMS is now losing the funding for those programs that had been provided through the years by the non-profit Charlotte Concerts, which had spent about $20,000 a year on them.

That has left the district scrambling for alternative funding sources to keep the programs afloat. Without more money, parents may need to bear the cost of the event.

It’s yet another blow to the arts community in Charlotte, which has been battered by numerous financial issues after county voters rejected a referendum on a sales tax increase last fall that would have greatly increased funding for the arts and other groups.

Last spring, the almost 90-year-old Charlotte Concerts announced it would cease as an independent organization, with leaders saying it was time to rethink their role in the city’s arts landscape. The group decided to turn its remaining assets over to Queens University of Charlotte.

Charlotte Concerts had already funded the CMS honors music programs for the 2019-20 school year. But after this year, CMS will have to make a choice: find money for those programs, or ask parents to pay.

CMS music teachers run the events but aren’t paid above their normal salaries for CMS honors programs. One of those teachers, Courtney Guthrie, directs the string orchestra program at Community House Middle School in South Charlotte, and was herself a product of the CMS honors music programs.

“We are doing a severe injustice to our students if we cannot come up with a way to provide this experience for our kids,” she said.

Searching for donors

The programs are held throughout the year (band, orchestra and chorus programs are held separately) for about 770 students each year.

CMS won’t end the honors music programs because of the benefits they bring students, said Windy Fullagar, CMS performing arts specialist. But Fullager said she’s hesitant to ask families, PTAs or music booster programs to pay for them because not all families or schools have the money.

The per-student cost for high school chorus, for example, is $36, while the per-student cost for middle school band participants is $19 and orchestra students is $20, according to Fullager.

“The impact is that the students who would benefit the most would not be able to participate,” she said. “Our most economically disadvantaged schools just don’t have the funding to pay for a student to go, or to cover the substitutes that might be needed for (music) teachers to attend.”

“There’s a limit to who is going to be able to do it,” she said.

So far this year, each honors band, orchestra and chorus performance has ended with a pitch by CMS staffers: help us find donors to continue to fund the program.

Other problems

There are two other CMS casualties of the Charlotte Concerts dissolution.

Every year, the non-profit donated new instruments to high-poverty schools. Last year, for example, Charlotte Concerts gave more than 80 new instruments to Eastway Middle School, Ridge Road Middle School and Harding University High School, Anderson said.

And for the past three years, Charlotte Concerts organized and funded the popular spring “Musical Showcase” program which gave hundreds of band, orchestra and chorus students from CMS elementary, middle and high schools the chance to perform onstage at the Belk Theater at a one-evening event.

Each year, Charlotte Concerts organized the event and rounded up in-kind donations and individual donations and corporate sponsorships to pay for it, former Charlotte Concerts Board President Paul Anderson said.

But there will be no Musical Showcase this school year, Fullager said, because CMS lacks the resources and staffing to pull it off.

Leslie Schlernitzauer, a former Charlotte Concerts executive director who chaired the task force to decide the organization’s future, said “our relationship with CMS was great. And we were able to directly see the benefits because of the children who had access to musical experiences that they wouldn’t have had.”

She said the task force spent months trying to decide how best to carry on the group’s legacy with the money that was left over. And while funding the CMS programs was no longer in the plan, creating a scholarship and concert at Queens seemed the best way.

The money will be used to fund a music scholarship and an annual classical music concert at the university’s Sarah Belk Gambrell Center for the Arts and Civic Engagement.

Teachers worried

To participate in the honors music programs, CMS students are nominated by their chorus or band teachers — or in the case of string orchestra, they audition in front of judges.

Once selected, they receive a repertoire of music and practice it independently before meeting together for an intensive Friday-Saturday program at a CMS school or local church. (Elementary chorus is a one-day event.) All events end with a concert.

The annual $20,000 in Charlotte Concerts funding was used for things like hiring music coaches and conductors from outside of CMS, sheet music, paying substitute teachers for CMS music teachers to attend Friday rehearsals, T-shirts and transportation in some cases.

CMS music teachers run the events but aren’t paid above their normal salaries for CMS honors programs.

Guthrie, the teacher who used to be in the program, remembers how coming together with other orchestra students gave her comfort (she attended Crestdale Middle School, which had a small orchestra program), and how being exposed to other teachers and students helped her love for music to grow.

“Sometimes, it sparks their fire. All of a sudden they want (private) lessons, and then they want to do a community youth orchestra,” Guthrie said. “They enjoy playing their instrument and it’s not such a chore anymore. I see that in a lot of my students.

“I’m really worried that there will be people who cannot do it anymore who really need to be doing it.”

This story was originally published March 6, 2020 at 3:08 PM.