PMEA
District 1
Advocacy Resources
Last Updated: April 07, 2008
PMEA/PLAN in Support Music Spotlight
PMEA is currently featured on the home page of www.supportmusic.com/
If you have never visited this site . . . now is the time! It is the web site I regularly recommend to PMEA members to find relevant advocacy materials and is the best source for information and advice for dealing with a music education crisis in the schools.
I encourage all of you to familiarize yourself with this valuable resource.
Advocacy Chairperson, Pennsylvania Music Educators Association (PMEA)
Voice: (814) 466-6768
Sent to PLAN Network: 4/1/08
National Arts Advocacy Day
Today, hundreds of dedicated
arts supporters from across the country have come together in
Washington, DC for National Arts Advocacy Day, a united effort to tell
Capitol Hill how important culture is to our communities, how much arts
education means to our children, and how much the arts improve our daily
lives. 87 National CoSponsors have helped shape this united arts message
to Congress.
For the second consecutive year, the House Interior Appropriations
Subcommittee will hold a hearing on the arts in conjunction with Arts
Advocacy Day. Chairman Norm Dicks (D-WA) has again asked Americans for
the Arts to exclusively assemble a national panel that will highlight
the contributions the arts provide for our country. We are very pleased
that the President & CEO Robert Lynch will be joined by several other
national leaders in the arts, including actor/director Robert
Redford and musician John Legend, to testify at the hearing.
Even if you’re not able to go to Washington, you can still participate
in Arts Advocacy Day by asking your Members of Congress to support the
arts. By visiting the Americans for the Arts E-Advocacy Center ( www.capwiz.com/artsusa/issues/alert/?alertid=9482296) you’ll
be able to send a message directly to your Representative and Senators
telling them why the arts are important to you and your community. They
have provided bullet points covering eleven key Arts Advocacy Day
issues, which you can use in the sample letter that they have drafted
for you. We also encourage you to write your own unique story to
illustrate the importance of the arts to your community. Using the
E-Advocacy Center, you can create and send your letter to Congress in
less than two minutes. We urge you to send your message to Congress
today to coincide with our office visits to the Hill.
Last year advocates sent out over 4,300 messages to 445 Capitol Hill
offices within hours, greatly increasing the visibility of the arts
supporters visiting with their Members that day! We hope to have that
kind of impact again this year.
Thank you for your continued support of the arts!
* * *
Advocacy Chairperson, Pennsylvania Music Educators Association (PMEA)
Voice: (814) 466-6768
Sent to Membership: 3/13/08
Creativity Jazzes Your Brain
EDITOR'S NOTE: A number
of PLAN network members sent this to me today to pass on to our
membership. One more reason why music (and including the National
Standard on improvisation) is so important in the school curriculum! . .
. RV
Study: Creativity Jazzes Your Brain
By LAURAN NEERGAARD, AP
WASHINGTON — Scientists inspired by the legendary improv of Miles Davis
and John Coltrane are peering inside the brains of today's jazz
musicians to learn where creativity comes from. Think dreaming.
This isn't just a curiosity for jazz fans but a bold experiment in the
neuroscience of music, a field that's booming as researchers realize
that music illuminates how the brain works. How we play and hear music
provides a window into most everyday cognitive functions — from
attention to emotion to memory — that in turn may help find treatments
for brain disorders.
Creativity, though, has long been deemed too elusive to measure.
Saxophonist-turned-hearing specialist Dr. Charles Limb thought jazz
improvisation provided a perfect tool to do so — by comparing what
happens in trained musicians' brains when they play by memory and when
they riff.
"It's one thing to come up with a ditty. It's another thing entirely to
come up with a masterpiece, an hourlong idea after idea," explains Limb,
a Johns Hopkins University otolaryngologist whose ultimate goal is to
help the deaf not only hear but hear music.
How do you watch a brain on jazz? Inside an MRI scanner that measures
changes in oxygen use by different brain regions as they perform
different tasks.
You can't play trumpet or sax inside the giant magnet that is an MRI
machine. So Limb and Dr. Allen Braun at the National Institutes of
Health hired a company to make a special plastic keyboard that would fit
inside the cramped MRI with no metal to bother the magnet.
Then they put six professional jazz pianists inside to measure brain
activity while they played straight and when they improvised. They
played, right-handed, both a simple C scale and a blues tune that Limb
wrote, appropriately titled "Magnetism." Through earphones, they
listened to a prerecorded jazz quartet accompaniment, to simulate a real
gig.
Getting creative uses the same brain circuitry that Braun has measured
during dreaming: First, inhibition switched off. The scientists watched
a brain region responsible for that self-monitoring, the dorsolateral
prefrontal cortex, shut down.
Then self-expression switched on. A smaller area called the medial
prefrontal cortex fired up, a key finding as Braun's earlier research on
how language forms linked that region to autobiographical storytelling.
And jazz improvisation produces such individual styles that it's often
described as telling your own musical story.
More intriguing, the musicians also showed heightened sensory awareness.
Regions involved with touch, hearing and sight revved up during improv
even though no one touched or saw anything different, and the only new
sounds were the ones they created.
That doesn't necessarily mean this is the center of creativity. The
brains of highly trained musicians might work differently than an
amateur pianist's, or a painter's, or a writer's, something Limb and
Braun hope to test next.
"We're all creative every day. Are our brains doing the same things?"
asks Braun, who studies the relationship of language and music at NIH's
National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders.
The study's biggest significance isn't what it found but that it could
be performed at all, opening new avenues of brain research.
"Improvisation always has a sort of magical quality associated with it.
People think when you're improvising you have some sort of inspiration
that's not measurable," says Dr. Robert Zatorre of the Montreal
Neurological Institute, a pioneer in the neuroscience of music and
himself a classical organist. "They went forward where everyone else
feared to tread."
Neuroscientists call the brain plastic, meaning it has remarkable
flexibility to rewire itself. Unraveling how those circuits get modified
in turn helps researchers hunt treatments for brain disorders — and the
same circuits that process music show strong relationships with other
key brain regions. Studies show that patients learning to speak again
after a stroke may improve faster if they sing rather than recite, for
example. Zatorre's team is finding parallels between tone-deafness and
the reading disability dyslexia.
"What we're doing is not necessarily trying to say, 'Well, if we use
music it will help Parkinson's patients walk.' It might, yes, and there
is some evidence it does so," says Zatorre, whose institute this summer
hosts an international conference on music and the brain.
Instead, the quest is to "understand the rules by which the brain
changes its organization. That's what we need to know," he adds.
Creativity comes in because its root is the spontaneity that defines
everyday life. Consider conversation: Hopkins' Limb wants to image the
brains of jazz musicians "trading fours," where one improvises four bars
and the next answers back with four new bars — a musical conversation he
believes comparable to the talking kind.
And no, Limb doesn't think he's diminishing the magic of music by
finding its cerebral underpinnings.
"It's like knowing how an airplane flies. It's still pretty magical."
Advocacy Chairperson, Pennsylvania Music Educators Association (PMEA)
Voice: (814) 466-6768
Sent to Membership: 2/18/08
Time to Put the Candidates to the Test
EDITOR'S NOTE: The latest NEWSWEEK magazine published
the following article summarizing the positions of the remaining
four presidential candidates. Although we certainly can argue with
both the premise used and the conclusions reached by the "experts"
consulted by Newsweek in this story, the concise summary of the
candidates positions on NCLB, School Choice, and teacher performance
pay may be useful in helping you decide who to support in the
upcoming Pennsylvania primary. As a personal observation . . . I
find it both interesting and somewhat infuriating that the only
candidate to specifically mention the importance of music and the
arts got the lowest grade from this panel! - - -RV
* * *
Time to Put the Candidates
to the Test
In this primary season, one major issue has been all but missing in action: education. Most experts agree that No Child Left Behind, President Bush's plan for closing the achievement gap between rich and poor kids, is a noble effort. But it has serious downsides. It punishes struggling schools, turns classes into test-prep factories and has caused some states to lower, not raise, standards. How will the next president fix it? NEWSWEEK asked two experts, the Education Sector's Thomas Toch and Jeanne Allen, chief of the Center for Education Reform, to evaluate each candidate's plan. Then we assigned grades.
Clinton
The Stance : She has Bill bashing NCLB on the campaign trail but also
pushed for more federal money to help schools give higher-quality tests.
Would track every student in every grade. Wants more money for
early-childhood education.
The Reality Check: Allen say she's currying favor with the largely
Democratic teacher's unions, who hate the rigid NCLB, while still
backing accountability. Toch says look for her to warm up to the idea of
performance pay if she's the nominee.
Grade B-
* * *
Obama
The Stance : Wants the federal government to measure skills such as
conducting research, defending ideas and solving problems. Wants schools
to use test data to help shape lessons. Favors performance pay for
teachers.
The Reality Check: Well intentioned, but Allen warns that the skills he
likes are hard to test statewide. Toch applauds efforts to test kids on
thinking, not regurgitation. Performance pay, he warns, is easy to talk
about but hard to execute.
Grade B+
* * *
McCain
The Stance : Likes NCLB but wants to change the tone: support, not
confront, failing schools. He'd revamp Head Start and improve rates of
high-school graduation, too. Supports the spread of charter schools and
vouchers.
The Reality Check: Allen applauds his stance on school choice but frets
that supporting schools means coddling school boards and unions.
Ensuring more kids graduate from high school is a good idea, says Toch,
but how exactly do you do that?
Grade B+
* * *
* * *
Sent to Membership 2/6/08
President's Budget Released
President Bush yesterday sent his FY 2009
budget request to Congress, beginning the yearly appropriations process for,
among many things, the nation's cultural agencies and programs,
including the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), National Endowment for
the Humanities (NEH), Office of Museum Services (OMS), Corporation for
Public Broadcasting (CPB), and the Department of Education's Arts in
Education programs. Because drastic cuts are being proposed for some key
arts programs, we urge you to write your members of congress and tell them
to reject the President's budget cuts.
For the eighth consecutive year, the President's budget has eliminated
funding for the Department of Education's Arts in Education programs, which
include funding for model arts programs and collaborations with schools,
teacher professional development, and arts programs for at-risk youth. Arts
literacy is as central to an educated citizenry as are reading, math, and
science. The Administration needs to understand the role of arts education
in developing an innovative and creative society.
Music education advocates can make their voices heard by writing or calling
their Members of Congress and urging them to increase funding for music
education and the other arts by restoring designated monies for arts in
education programs in the FY 2009 budget.
TWO MINUTES is all it will take to tell congress that you support the Arts
and Arts education. Go to the Americans for the Arts E Advocacy Center web
site at:
http://capwiz.com/artsusa/home/
Click under the words Federal: President's Budget Released and follow the
simple directions. In the time it took you to read this email message you
will have sent an important email to your legislators!
Music Teacher Wins 2007 PA Teacher of the Year
Congratulations to David Woten, Jr for this honor! All music advocates
should take special note of what the AP reporter writes in the last two
sentences of this press release. - - RV
By MARTHA RAFFAELE AP Education Writer
David Woten Jr., 38, who teaches in the North Allegheny School District, was selected from a field of 12 finalists. He will represent Pennsylvania in the national Teacher of the Year competition in Washington, D.C., in the spring.
The Carson Middle School teacher oversees the sixth- and seventh-grade chorus and teaches eighth-grade general music. He said he was inspired to become an educator by teachers he had as youngster in the Ambridge School District, and that he chose music because he recognized it was his strongest talent.
"It was something I was successful at early," Woten said.
Woten earned a bachelor's degree from Slippery Rock University in 1991 and a master's from Duquesne University in 1996. He has spent his entire 16-year teaching career at the middle school, where the number of students enrolled in the sixth and seventh grade music elective classes has grown from 35 to more than 250 during his tenure.
Woten was nominated by middle school principal Brian Miller, who said he also plays a key role as a mentor to new hires and to student teachers who are assigned to his classroom.
"His impact on learning is incredible," Miller said.
One of his former students, Amy Mencini, recalled that on her first day in his classroom, Woten greeted students with a song and a huge smile as he stood by the doorway.
He kept a positive attitude, even when students were having a bad day or struggling to learn a difficult composition, said Mencini, now a 16-year-old high school sophomore.
"Being the wise teacher that he is, he used his energetic ways and creativity to help a large group of kids, all at different levels of musical talent, to achieve what we thought were unattainable goals," she said.
In the classroom, Woten said he tries to go beyond merely teaching music and help students relate what they learn to other subjects and to life skills they will need to succeed.
Woten said he tells parents that if their children "can stand up and sing alone in front of their classmates, going to a job interview's easy."
* * *
Advocacy Chairperson, Pennsylvania Music Educators Association (PMEA)
Voice: (814) 466-6768
Sent to Membership
9/5/07
| Subject: | NCLB: The President's proposal |
|---|---|
| Date: | Tue, 4 Sep 2007 17:25:30 -0400 |
| From: | Richard Victor <rdv11@scasd.org> |
Editors Note: Following is the complete, just-released statement from the U.S. Department of Education announcing President Bush's reauthorizaion proposal for No Child Left Behind. By taking note of what is included in this statement, we can determine where the administration will focus their attention. It looks like "Incentive Pay" ( a new way to say Merit Pay) tied to test scores, and "Promise scholarships" (an updated version of School Choice) will be their main talking points. Neither aligns well with the future of music education.&nbs p; On the other hand, the final sentence gives us the opportunity to advocate for the inclusion of music in the new legislation by virtue of music's ability to impact the dropout rate and prepare students for success in the global marketplace - - RV
* * *
In September, congressional committees are expected to begin significant work on reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). Through continued bipartisan support, President George W. Bush is looking to improve on provisions of the law that have drawn concern while strengthening those measures that already have proven successful in the nation's schools over the last five years. According to recent data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, achievement gaps in reading and math between African-American and Hispanic nine-year-olds and their white peers have fallen to all-time lows.
"The economy is going to demand brain power as we head into the 21st century; therefore, now is the time to make sure that our fourth-graders can read, write, and add and subtract, that our eighth-graders are more proficient in math, and that when you graduate from high school, your diploma means something. The best place to start is to measure. And when you see a problem, fix it before it's too late," President Bush said at the American Legislative Exchange Council in July, referring to NCLB's requirements for annual testing in grades 3-8 and once at the high school level.
The proposal also puts a
greater emphasis on high school graduation in response to the nation's
high school dropout crisis, by requiring states to report a more
accurate graduation rate and to work with colleges and businesses to
better align the high school curriculum with the requirements of higher
education and employers.
Advocacy Chairperson, Pennsylvania Music Educators Association (PMEA)
Voice: (814) 466-6768
Sent to Membership 3/20/07
Advocacy Article
Subject:
Music Training 'Tunes' Human Auditory System
Date: Sun, 18 Mar 2007 11:35:51 -0400
From: Richard Victor <rdv11@scasd.org>
EDITOR'S NOTE: Here is an article recently distributed by the Council for
Exceptional Children to their list serv - - RV
* * *
Music Training 'Tunes' Human Auditory System
A newly published study by Northwestern University researchers suggests that
Mom was right when she insisted that you continue music lessons -- even
after it was clear that a professional music career was not in your future.
The study, which will appear in the April issue of Nature Neuroscience, is
the first to provide concrete evidence that playing a musical instrument
significantly enhances the brainstem's sensitivity to speech sounds. This
finding has broad implications because it applies to sound encoding skills
involved not only in music but also in language.
The findings indicate that experience with music at a young age in effect
can "fine-tune" the brain's auditory system. "Increasing music experience
appears to benefit all children -- whether musically exceptional or not --
in a wide range of learning activities," says Nina
Kraus, director of Northwestern's Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory and
senior author of the study.
"Our findings underscore the pervasive impact of musical training on
neurological development. Yet music classes are often among the first to be
cut when school budgets get tight. That's a mistake," says Kraus, Hugh
Knowles Professor of Neurobiology and Physiology and professor of
communication sciences and disorders.
"Our study is the first to ask whether enhancing the sound environment -- in
this case with musical training -- will positively affect the way an
individual encodes sound even at a level as basic as the brainstem," says
Patrick Wong, primary author of "Musical Experience Shapes Human Brainstem
Encoding of Linguistic Pitch Patterns." An old structure from an
evolutionary standpoint, the brainstem once was thought to only play
a passive role in auditory processing.
Using a novel experimental design, the researchers presented the Mandarin
word "mi" to 20 adults as they watched a movie. Half had at least six years
of musical instrument training starting before the age of 12. The other half
had minimal (less than 2 years) or no musical training. All were native
English speakers with no knowledge of Mandarin, a tone language.
In tone languages, a single word can differ in meaning depending on pitch
patterns called "tones." For example, the Mandarin word "mi" delivered in a
level tone means "to squint," in a rising tone means "to bewilder," and in a
dipping (falling then rising) tone means "rice." English, on the other hand,
only uses pitch to reflect intonation (as when rising pitch is used in
questions). As the subjects watched the movie, the researchers used
electrophysiological methods to measure and graph the accuracy of their
brainstem ability to track the three differently pitched "mi" sounds.
"Even with their attention focused on the movie and though the sounds had no
linguistic or musical meaning for them, we found our musically trained
subjects were far better at tracking the three different tones than the
non-musicians," says Wong, director of Northwestern's Speech Research
Laboratory and assistant professor of communication sciences and disorders.
The research by co-authors Wong, Kraus, Erika Skoe, Nicole Russo and Tasha
Dees represents a new way of defining the relationship between the brainstem
-- a lower order brain structure thought to be unchangeable and uninvolved
in complex processing -- and the neocortex, a higher order brain structure
associated with music, language and other complex processing.
These findings are in line with previous studies by Wong and his group
suggesting that musical experience can improve one's ability to learn tone
languages in adulthood and level of musical experience plays a role in the
degree of activation in the auditory cortex. Wong also is a faculty member
in Northwestern's Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program.
The findings also are consistent with studies by Kraus and her research team
that have revealed anomalies in brainstem sound encoding in some children
with learning disabilities which can be improved by auditory training.
"We've found that by playing music -- an action thought of as a function of
the neocortex -- a person may actually be tuning the brainstem," says Kraus.
"This suggests that the relationship between the brainstem and neocortex is
a dynamic and reciprocal one and tells us that our basic sensory circuitry
is more malleable than we previously thought."
Overall, the findings assist in unfolding new lines of inquiry. The
researchers now are looking to find ways to "train" the brain to better
encode sound -- work that potentially has far-reaching educational and
clinical implications. The study was supported by Northwestern University,
grants from the National Institutes of Health and a grant
from the National Science Foundation.
Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Northwestern
University.
SOURCE: sciencedaily.com
Sent to Membership 2/26/07
Advocacy Article
EDITOR'S NOTE:
Here is an editorial which appeared Sunday in my local newspaper - the
Centre Daily Times. Hopefully, editorials and articles such as this
one have appeared and will continue to appear in newspapers throughout the
state. If a good advocacy article or editorial appears in your local
newspaper and is reprinted online, then please send me an email with a link
to that article so I can share it with everyone on the Advocacy network. - -
RV
Richard Victor
PMEA Advocacy Chairperson
rdv11@scasd.org
* * *
It's time to leave this act behind
Sunday, Feb 25, 2007
By 2014, the United States should have the best test-taking students in the
industrialized world as a result of the centerpiece of the Bush
administration's educational policy, the No Child Left Behind Act.
But problem solvers, creative thinkers, artists and musicians? Sorry, there
just isn't the time to develop them.
The quest for accountability and establishing minimum standards for all
students has forced educators to "teach to the test."
Flexibility, creativity, inspiration? There just isn't time.
Nor is there the money that is needed -- desperately in many school
districts -- to ensure that the mandated standards are met.
Special reading and math programs aren't free. Nor are they funded by the
federal law that makes them necessary.
So local administrators are left with a choice, which really isn't a choice
at all: raise taxes even higher (unlikely or impossible) or rob Peter (in
this case, art, music, physical education and other subject areas that help
develop well-rounded, creative, adaptive problem solvers) to pay for Paul's
(or Uncle Sam's) mandates.
The goals behind No Child Left Behind were, and remain, laudable: raising
the level of achievement for all students, reducing the achievement gap
between whites and minorities, improving failing school districts and
holding everyone in the educational process accountable.
Five years in, however, the act has yet to prove its effectiveness. Two
federal reports released last week indicate that students may be earning
more credits, taking more challenging courses and getting better grades, but
high school seniors are still doing poorly on national math and reading
tests.
The gap in reading scores between whites and minorities is relatively
unchanged since 2002.
The Bush administration wants to add more testing. What is needed, however,
is more teaching.
Let the teachers teach. That is what they are trained to do. That is their
passion, the reason they went into education: to help awaken young minds,
not to help kids prepare for the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment
Tests year after year after year.
But what choice do today's teachers have? Districts that don't meet the
standards set in Harrisburg or Washington -- arguably, the districts that
need the most help -- are punished. They get less of what they need -- money
and resources -- and more oversight.
We're from the government and we're here to help -- to help show you how to
take tests.
Not every school district is the same. The State College Area School
District bears little resemblance to one in, say, Plano, Texas. It may not
have all that much in common with its neighbors adjacent to or within Centre
County either.
It seems short-sighted to impose a one-size-fits-all standard on young
minds.
That is what our schools, ideally, should be developing: Young people who
can contribute to and better our society, not those who are capable of
passing multiple-choice and essay tests, not No. 2 pencil-wielding
automatons.
And just as soldiers on the ground know more about what they need to succeed
than do the stateside planners in the strategy room, so do the teachers know
-- much more so, than the politicians -- what is required in the classroom.
Let them teach.
Let local administrators administer -- real education, not just tests.
The No Child Left Behind Act has been put to the test and found wanting.
It's time to get much more creative.
SOURCE: centredaily.com
Sent to Membership 2/15/07
Grammy President Hits a High Note
for Music Education
Subject: Grammy
President Hits a High Note for Music Education
Date: Mon, 12 Feb 2007 14:59:36 -0500
From: Richard Victor <rdv11@scasd.org>
Editors Note: Grammy President Neil Portow gave this speech at last
night's Grammy Awards. Please take a minute to follow up his wonderful
speech by sending an email to Governor Rendell and your local state
representatives. Just click on the link below. It will only take
you a few minutes! - - - RV
* * *
Grammy President Hits a High Note for Music Education
Neil Portnow, Recording Academy President, took to the stage of the 49th
Annual Grammy Awards to ask the country to take a stand for music and arts
education.
What if the GRAMMYs had to give up the Best New Artist category because
there weren't any? Well, as long as The Recording Academy has anything to
say about it, that's not going to happen! Tonight, we've already met some of
this year's remarkable Best New Artist nominees, and in a few minutes, we'll
see a fresh new face experience her "ultimate" GRAMMY Moment provided by The
Academy.
When I was just 6 years old, I watched Elvis on TV, and knew what I wanted
to do with my life. And thanks to my parents and the dedicated music
teachers at school, I realized my dream of a career in music. Now, we need
to make sure that others have that same chance.
Let me show you exactly what I'm talking about. Meet Anne Lee, a very
talented 15-year-old public school music student, and Christian Sands, a 17
year old who won a spot in our GRAMMY Jazz Ensemble.
Our GRAMMY Foundation programs like GRAMMY in the Schools and GRAMMY Camp
teach and encourage thousands of kids who love music, and whose lives are
better for it. This underscores the most fundamental point - every child
deserves exposure to music and the arts in school!
There are some encouraging signs out there. Just this year, The Recording
Academy and the music community rallied their forces here in California to
reverse the trend of reduced funding. The result: more than 100 million
dollars for music education with millions more for instruments in schools.
The time is now to contact your elected leaders. Tell them that music is
just as essential to the next generation's development as any other subject.
We'll make it easy for you - go to GRAMMY.com. We'll connect you directly to
your representatives so your voice can be heard.
You're here - or out there - because music is an important part of your
life. Together let us all ensure that music stays just as vital and alive
for generations still to come.
Lend your voice to the effort here!
<http://www3.capwiz.com/grammy/issues/alert/?alertid=9325291&type=ml>
(link to grammy. com)
Source: The Recording Academy
Sent to Membership 2/7/07
Post Gazette Advocacy
Article
Kate Pielemeier is a
Coro Fellow and is spending four weeks at the Post-Gazette as a staff
writer. Click on the link below to read her article from Wednesday's edition
of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette entitled, "Human resource experts say
workers could benefit more from art than from math and science."
Then, pass it on to your administrators!
Click here to view the article from 2/7/07
Sent to
Membership 1/23/07
Advocacy Information from State
Chair
Click on the following files to
view articles sent to our membership from State Advocacy Chair Richard
Victor. The first is an article, then the text of an e-mail about Act
1, followed by a spreadsheet referred to in the Act 1 e-mail.
Article: "Joining
Children in Sweet Harmony"
E-mail from R. Victor:
Act 1 Information
Act 1 Spreadsheet