Out+of+the+Box

List ideas that may be new or never been thought of regarding how students can be selected to district festivals. What if the audition process took place and the top kids in that audition were placed directly into the Region level ensemble? Then the next kids could form a district level ensemble. This would involve more students. It would give more students festival experience. The pressure to re-audition at Districts would be gone. The district festivals would be valued for their own teaching/learning and not seen as the stepping stone to the next level. Students would miss less school as they would only attend one or the other unless instrumentation mandated attending both. The district festivals could be shortened, beginning on Thursday morning or even Friday morning since time for re-auditions would not be needed.

A new idea was presented at DISTRICT 3 Chorus. Here's what I remember. (Fran Nesta, edited by Steve Luxbacher) 1. Each school sends a set amount of students to auditions. 2. Students audition. 3. Students are ranked. 4. A set number of students is determined for each section. 5. A sorting is done showing the students from each school according to their score and the rank order they achieved by their audition. 6. The top three rank order students are placed in the chorus from each school. (current minimum quota for our smallest schools). 7. The rest of the ensemble is filled by rank order earned at auditions. 8. There would be no automatic returns or courtesy appointments, as in our current system.

Glenn R. Cameron (D2):

Suggestion/Question: Can we consider using college campuses for hosting the state conference... after they complete classes for the spring term and before they being their summer sessions?