Four years ago, in the spring of 2023, my wife, Gwen, and I found ourselves asking a pretty simple question about our daughter’s eighth-grade schedule at Avon Middle School North in Indiana: Where did the second elective go? I wasn’t initially trying to make an argument about intervention, standardized testing, school accountability, or even fine arts. I was trying to understand the schedule. I had spent much of my professional life working in and around public schools and ha

Growing up in the Northeast, I had no real concept of “Friday Night Football.” I knew it existed, but the sheer size, energy, and importance of it in Texas was something I couldn’t fully grasp until I lived it. It’s more than a game—it’s tradition, community pride, and an entire ecosystem of pageantry. At L.D. Bell High School, home of the State and National Champion Blue Raider Band, Friday wasn’t just a school day—it was a 16-hour event day, for 10 weeks spanning August to

MARCHING BAND VIDEO TALK-UPS! Start & Stop Video Feedback 🎥 Send a video link — Get back a link with improvement-based Feedback!📈

How Arlington ISD built a first-in-the-nation musical instrument repair class, creating workforce pathways through fine arts education

What The Cost of Not Playing Looks Like at District Scale What if one of Denton ISD’s most significant staffing opportunities is already sitting inside the master schedule? The answer may have less to do with cutting programs than with increasing participation. A structural modeling exercise suggests that relatively modest growth in band, choir, and orchestra participation across Denton ISD’s four comprehensive high schools could reduce long-term staffing pressure by approxim

A case study of how Arlington ISD differentiated itself by solving enrollment and facilities challenges through Fine Arts and Dual Language Academies.

Jeremy Earnhart Editor's Suggestion: First read The Cost of Not Playing: How Music Participation Shapes the Financial Health of a School District Start With the Better Question School districts often ask whether they can afford to provide musical instruments to students. Arlington ISD and Irving ISD asked a different question. Can we afford not to? Between 2009 and 2017, the two districts intentionally removed one of the largest barriers to participation in instrumental music

"Every educational system produces exactly the outcomes it is designed to produce." This article is part of School Music Consulting's Leadership & Policy series exploring how educational systems shape student opportunity. Over the past several months, I've written about the financial impact of comprehensive music programs (The Cost of Not Playing), the relationship between sustained arts participation and student attendance (The Unexpected Attendance Strategy), the unintended

When educators visit North Texas for the first time, they often ask the wrong question. They ask why the bands are so large. Why football stadiums resemble college venues. Why orchestras, CTE programs, debate teams, robotics clubs, and fine arts departments seem unusually comprehensive. The better question is: How did this happen? The answer is not football. It is not band. Those are outcomes. The answer is organizational design. Educational opportunity is not merely a functi

Students completing sustained arts coursework were 32.3% to 50.8% less likely to be chronically absent than their peers. Leadership Insight In March 2024, the Virginia Department of Education presented one of the most significant arts education findings of the past decade to the Virginia Board of Education. Students completing four years of fine arts coursework were 32% to 50% less likely to be chronically absent than their peers. Attendance isn't valuable simply because stud

The Remaining at 20: A Multimedia Retrospective The Remaining wasn't about a marching show. It was about what happens when a school district invests in children long enough for excellence to become the expectation. Beyond The Remaining preserves the story of a remarkable marching season while exploring the leadership, culture, instruction, and community that made it possible—and what today's educational leaders can still learn from it. This isn't just about a marching show. I

Over the past several months, I've written about the financial impact of comprehensive music programs (The Cost of Not Playing), the relationship between sustained arts participation and student attendance (The Unexpected Attendance Strategy), the unintended consequences of weighted cradit (The Hidden Cost of Class Rank), and why comprehensive public schools remain one of America's greatest educational inventions (The Accidental Masterpiece). ∗ ∗ ∗ Now, more than twenty years

Soul Tsunami featuring the Hurrican Horns Saturday, July 25 • 9:00 PM to Midnight Lee Harvey's • Dallas, TX A Multimedia Recap of the May 8 "Comeback Gig" After 20 years, the first note tells you everything you need to know. On May 8, 2026, Soul Tsunami walked back onto a stage together at Community Beer Company in Dallas. It had been been a minute. Long enough that there were plenty of questions before the first downbeat. Would the groove still be there? Would the horn secti

What an Unexpected Conversation in Anaheim Reminded Me About One of America's Greatest Institutions Over Christmas Break, I traveled to Anaheim to watch our daughter, Kierstyn, lead the Brownsburg High School Band as drum major in Disneyland's Downtown Disney parade — part of the band's Rose Parade trip, just ahead on New Year's Day. Running a little behind that morning, I grabbed an Uber from the hotel instead of walking. After spending the day with the band, I requested ano

Leadership Brief No. 1 The Sixth Grade Pipeline How the Point of Entry Determines the Strength of the Entire System Companion Article: The Sixth Grade Decision: Why the Most Important Scheduling Decision a School District Makes Happens Before Middle School Begins Jeremy L. Earnhart, Ed.D. District Fine Arts Leader • Education Strategist Editor's Note: Previous articles in this series examined the economics of music participation. This article covers the front door to the syst

My father's family and Billy Vera's family came up together in the entertainment business. Long before "At This Moment" became a number-one hit, Billy had done the work. I grew up hearing the story—not as a Hollywood success story, but as a hard-earned lesson in timing. Some ideas arrive before the room is ready for them. That does not make them wrong; it only makes them early. Billy Vera wrote "At This Moment" in 1977, but he couldn't even finish writing it for two years. Wh

Part III of III — Casio PT-1, AI, and All of Us Missed Part I or II? Read Part I — What Today's Graduate is Actually Walking Into Read Part II — The Swiss Army Knife Graduate At the end of Part II, we asked two questions. Which programs, already sitting inside your district, have been quietly building Swiss Army Knife Graduates all along? And what are they worth? In September 2024, I stood at a podium in front of the Indiana State Board of Education. The board was considering

Part II of III — Casio PT-1, AI, and All of Us Part I: What Today's Graduate is Actually Walking Into Part III: The Cost of Not Building Swiss Army Knife Graduates Missed Part I? Read Part I — Casio PT-1, AI, and All of Us: What Today's Graduate is Actually Walking Into *** A Casio PT-1 never made anyone a musician. It made a kid curious enough to push buttons, experiment with rhythms, and stumble into sounds that worked—and sounds that didn't. That curiosity, if it went anyw

The Financial Case for Music Program Expansion By Jeremy L. Earnhart, Ed.D. If you are reading this three weeks before a budget decision, this is the argument you have been looking for. Not because music matters. You already know that. Because the spreadsheet your CFO is looking at is incomplete—not because of bad math, but because it wasn't designed to measure one of the system's largest hidden costs. This article shows where the money is hiding and how to reframe the conver

Part I of III — Casio PT-1, AI, and All of Us Part II: The Swiss Army Knife Graduate Part III: The Cost of Not Bulinding The Swiss Army Knife Graduates Jeremy Earnhart, Ed.D. Imagine a set of Tinker Toys floating in the International Space Station. Now put them in a blender. Bulldoze them. Run them over with a steamroller. Shatter them into a million pieces and scatter them across every data farm being built on this planet right now. That is what today's graduate is going to