Fourth-grader Maia Stone and about a dozen other students sat in chairs and listened intently as local percussion instructor Elizabeth Raymond explained the basics of drumming inside a small classroom at Carlton Oaks School in Santee.
Proper posture. Putting a practice drum pad together. How to grip the drumsticks.
While most of the kids were ready to start banging away on their pads (and some did), Raymond did her best to keep the kids’ attention focused on step-by-step training tips and tried-and-true beginner techniques.
In another room at the school, instructor Joey Ortiz showed students how to press their lips together on a brass mouthpiece, creating a cacophony of noise on trumpets and slide trombones. And in yet another room, instructor Jaime Burke showed students how to assemble their saxophones and flutes and to make some elementary sounds come out of them.
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It was the first day of after-school music classes for students in the Santee School District after a decades-long drought.
Joey Ortiz worked with about a dozen elementary school children at Carlton Oaks Elementary School on Tuesday, January 28, 2020.
(Nelvin C. Cepeda / The San Diego Union-Tribune)
The district, in partnership with music professor James Sepulvado from Cuyamaca College and Bertrand’s Music in San Diego, just started offering the classes at all of its nine school sites. The Santee School District Foundation pitched in $40,000 to sponsor the classes, pay for instruction and help defer some of the cost to rent instruments, with no enrollment charges to families of fourth- through eighth-grade students.
Maia is one of more than 300 students in the 3,900-student district who have signed up for the program. Students are instructed for about one hour after school once a week.
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For Maia, who says her drumming has mostly consisted of a lot of banging on her seat at her desk at school, the music classes are exactly what she needs.
“I’m feeling like it’s a real good fit,” Maia said after her first class. “I feel like, ‘Hey I’ve done this before,’ and I could relate to what I’m doing here. I know how it reflects on a pattern and how you vibrate it and it feels really good to finally be using what I’ve been doing in class. It feels unique. It has opened a new portal and it just feels good.”
Sepulvado, a 2002 Helix High School alum, says for years in the 1970s and ‘80s, East County area bands were considered some of the best in the country. Mount Miguel High School’s band was a perennial powerhouse in the annual Rose Bowl Parade in Pasadena. Grossmont, Helix and Monte Vista high school bands also made many appearances in that parade and others around the state. Those three high schools in particular dominated competitions for decades.
But band programs at the high school level have suffered over the past few decades, in part because the middle and elementary schools stopped acting as a pipeline.
Lucy George,11, a fifth grader at Carlton Oaks Elementary School, took her first flute first lesson. George is one of more than 300 students enrolled in music lesson at the Carlton Oaks Elementary School in Santee.
(Nelvin C. Cepeda / The San Diego Union-Tribune)
“I want to do everything I can to restore music to East County,” Sepulvado said. “For whatever reason, it’s night and day from what it used to be. Mount Miguel, Helix, Monte Vista, they were all powerhouses schools. Now a lot of them barely have program.”
Budget cuts, funding challenges and changes in priorities over the years all but ended the Santee district’s music program and left it with little to offer those children who wanted to learn how to play an instrument. An on-and-off again guitar lesson program flourished, then faded away.
But last year, Santee School District Superintendent Kristin Baranski and the Santee School District Governing Board determined that a strong music program would serve other areas of learning and social well-being, including math and language skills, hand-eye coordination, discipline and teamwork.
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Baranski and the board reached out to the County Department of Education, which helped connect them with Sepulvado. And thus the partnership began with the Santee Schools Foundation and Cuyamaca to create a new music education program that all entities hope might spark a return to East County’s musical glory.
Beyond teaching the kids in the district who want to learn music, Sepulvado said the ultimate goal of the program is to put on a concert in June in tandem with the two Santee area high schools, Santana and West Hills.
Joey Minor is a fifth-grade student at Carlton Oaks who already knows how to play the recorder. He said he decided to take up the trumpet -- which he said “is really easy” -- so he will know how to play the same instrument as his mom, dad, uncle and grandfather.
After the first day of classes, Joey said he is looking forward to the June concert with his classmates and that “with enough practice I think we’ll be ready.”
The fresh young faces seem to greatly appeal to the instructors from Bertrand’s Music.
“It’s so fun to be able to do all this, especially in a community without an active music program, to bring music into their lives,” said Burke, a San Diego State University alumna. “It’s really cool we’re able to bring it to the kids. It’s so nice to teach these kids and see how excited they are to make sounds and hear them say they want to play solos at home for their parents.”
Ortiz, a local who attended Spring Valley Middle School and Monte Vista and Valhalla high schools, said that this is his first time teaching classes of students. He called working with the kids “exhilarating.”
“I love teaching music,” Ortiz said. “My goal is to provide a warm welcoming environment for these aspiring musicians as they discover the joy and love for music as music teachers did for me when I was a student.”
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Sepulvado said he is hoping to get people in the community to help continue the program in the future. He has helped set up a website at https://www.eastcountyscene.com/santeeschools to provide information on donating musical instruments to the program for those kids in need.
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