This past weekend, 20 Bailey band and chorus students participated in the Connecticut Music Educator’s Associations (CMEA) Southern Regional Middle School Festival. This is the most students that we have ever had participate in the middle school music honors festival! We had students represented in five of the seven ensembles: Band, Orchestra, Steel Drum Band, Treble Choir, and Mixed Choir.
For the past two years, CMEA has been tracking the participation of students by school and DRG to increase equity and access to all students. During the festival, CMEA released those statistics:
– Bailey students represented 4.9 percent of the entire festival. (That is up from 1.8% in 2010 when I first started to track this data.)
– West Haven is one of four schools in the 41-school region that is in DRG H (Ansonia, Derby, and Meriden being the other three). West Haven students represented 66 percent of the students participating in the festival from a DRG H school.
– Bailey had the largest amount of music student participation out of any other school in DRG D,E,F,G,H, or I.