SILVERTON

Silverton event: How can schools get more music to more kids?

Christena Brooks
Special to the Statesman

How can Silverton schools get more music to more kids?

A local non-profit has hired a Minnesota-based consultant to try to answer the question at a community forum on Saturday, April 13.

Dr. John Benham, author of “Music Advocacy: Moving from Survival to Vision,” arrives this week to survey the school district’s music offerings and give ideas for improvement. He’s been hired by Silverton Friends of Music, a three-year-old non-profit devoted to promoting music instruction in area schools.

Benham has traveled to 47 states and six Canadian provinces in a quest to keep and support music instruction in schools and “develop collaborative solutions in a language that communicates with the educator and the community as well as the school board and administration,” according to his website www.save-music.org.

He’s consulted for six school districts in Oregon, including the Salem-Keizer School District.

“In each case, except for one, it was the music coalition that invited me to come,” he said. “In the one exception it was actually the superintendent that invited me to come because he wanted to reorganize the program and set it up for improvement.”

After several days of meetings and data gathering, Benham plans to share a status report at Saturday’s forum, from 9 to 11 a.m., upstairs at Trinity Lutheran Church, at 500 N. 2nd St.