Hello everyone,

So we're in a bit of a pickle...

I teach a small band (high school) and things are not looking good for next year. Basically, our administration dropped the ball on us this year and there was a scheduling nightmare that prevented us from getting good numbers from the middle school. We've had several talks with them, and I don't want to say that they "screwed up", but they definitely recognize that they didn't exactly have our best interests in mind when the master schedule was designed. Good news is that they want to do better and they're responding to our feedback and promising to do better for us next year.

The other bad news is that we recently lost a great director at our middle school. The kids LOVED him down there and so when we hired a new director, there was a mass exodus with kids leaving the program. Our new middle school director is trying to do his best to pick up the pieces, but the program is in shambles.

And lastly, in our small band of about 40 students, we're graduating about 25 which includes literally our ENTIRE brass section. We're going to be left with 0 returning brass students next year.

So the predicament is, right now we have a total of 16 8th graders that could potentially get. Of those students, about 4 of them are brass players. We're definitely not going to get all 16. We usually lose at least a fourth of those students because they transfer to other schools (and those are usually the best and brightest students too), and another fourth to two fourths will quit for a variety of other reasons.

So I'm sure you can understand why I'm sweating bullets for next year. I'm wondering how I can salvage this situation. I'm thinking of refocusing my recruitment efforts to students that have quit band, but I don't know how to go about that. I'm sure most of them are strutting around campus acting like they made the best decision of their lives after having never given the high school program a chance. I even have other students in different classes that will go on and on about how much they loved band, but when I try to convince them to join again, I always hear a multitude of excuses. But the most common thing is that another program picked them up (sports, CTE, etc) and they think that band will be too much of a time commitment and get in the way of their other activities. So would I even be successful in this sort of campaign?

What would you all do in my shoes?