Bringing back music education

On Friday, at Tustumena Elementary School, Delana Green asked a group of around two dozen kindergartners if they had ever had a music class before — in or out of school. None raised their hands.

“Zippo,” she said. “Well, that’s even more special. I get to be your first music teacher.”

Green, through her own music education program Greenhouse Music, is teaching music at Tustumena three times a week through the end of the year. Her first day at the school was March 19. Friday, March 21, was her first time working with Tustumena’s youngest students in kindergarten and first grade.

0 seconds of 0 secondsVolume 0%

00:00

Bringing Greenhouse into local schools has been a long-term goal, Green said Friday. It started a few years ago when one of her students asked her to teach at their school, because there wasn’t any music there anymore.

At that time, when Green looked at music programs in the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District, she saw six open music teacher positions.

This week, only seven of the 22 elementary schools in the district listed a music teacher in their staff directory — those teachers located in Kenai, Soldotna, Homer and Anchor Point. KPBSD administration did not respond, as of Tuesday evening, to a request for information about music staffing on Monday.

Green wants to see music back in local schools and back before children.

“We’ve had less music programs,” she said. “We keep losing it and these kids are thirsty for it. They’re the ones that are asking about it. They’re the ones that are begging for it.”

Green has been seeking an arrangement to bring music into a school, “even if it was once a week.” It was Tustumena Principal Devin Way who reached out and made it happen. Tustumena receives federal funding as a Title I school, and that funding is often used to bring in an artist in residence for art programming. That’s the same arrangement being used now to get Green in the classroom.

On Friday, Way said, she’d already heard from parents excited about music education. The call to hire a music teacher has been heard for a while, she said, but “tough” amid larger staffing challenges. In only a few days of music education, she said she’s seen students engaged and excited about the program.

Only the oldest students at Tustumena, in the sixth grade, said they remembered taking music classes before, Green said, and they’d only had it in kindergarten themselves.

Because many of the students at Tustumena have had none or very little dedicated music instruction, Green said they’ve started “very basic,” with concepts like rhythm and percussion. There are “layers,” she said. Students started last week with simple ideas like rhythm and repetition. Over the coming months, they’ll be learning songs to perform at a year-end show in May.

Some of the challenges with a lack of a musical foundation, Green said, extend far beyond Tustumena’s walls. When teaching music, she always must approach with “no assumptions.” Today’s students aren’t necessarily even familiar with popular nursery rhymes, as a decline in preschool programs means they aren’t learning them.

On Friday, Green’s kindergarteners began with egg-shaped shakers, following along with rhythms led by their teacher and singing along. One of the first concepts Green said she approaches with her classes is following along with a director — who provides important cues like “what to play, when to play, how loud, how fast, how soft and how slow.”

The kindergartners also used their own bodies as an instrument, clapping their hands and stomping their feet in time with the music playing.

A group of second graders who had class with Green the same day similarly explored ideas of rhythm, volume and tempo, but in another way. Students passed a ball across the room, playing a variety of percussive instruments with that ball as a conductor — stopping it stopped, playing slow when it moved slow or playing rapidly as it moved more quickly across the room.

The older students also began to explore different tones, noting the difference between low-pitched bass clef notes and higher pitched treble clef notes.

Green said she grew up in the district and learned music herself in local schools. She’s been teaching music since 2013, as Greenhouse since the early 2020s. Music is important for brain development, she said. It’s a “whole body experience” that stimulates a student physically while also engaging concepts analogous to math and reading.

Students are learning to express themselves and challenge themselves in a way that they wouldn’t otherwise.

“There’s so many benefits, therapeutically and educational and sensory and socially,” Green said. “It’s, across the board, something that benefits and enriches a child’s life.”

There were “bumps” to surmount in working out the details of bringing Green in as an artist in residence, Way said. Parents and teachers asked for the very solution that was implemented, relying on Title I funds and an artist in residency to provide the programming, but it took some time to get from an idea to hosting Green in a classroom. Hopefully, Way said, they can “be the pilot program” before other schools follow suit.

Green said she developed her lesson plan to bring music into a school, even when she’s not there. Some teachers at Tustumena are already doing what they can to integrate music into their lessons, and Green said she wants to supplement that work. Way said some of Tustumena’s teachers have music background and are already bringing some of those ideas into the classroom “with the time that they have,” but there’s space for more music in the students’ days.

“I didn’t want to create a program that was going to end up being a burden on teachers and ask more of them,” Green said. “I wanted to create something that’s woven into what they’re already doing.”

Green says she wants to see the model for providing ad hoc music education that she and Way have developed at Tustumena expanded within the district and within the state. There are many schools, she said, in need of music education. With the model now designed and implemented, it’ll be more “simple” to repeat the program at Tustumena or at other schools.

This model, she said, is an answer to bringing music back to elementary schools. Without it, as students reach later in life before being exposed to music education — learning basics in middle or high school — Green said she worries those more advanced programs will begin to wither away too.

“We’re going to lose it, and this is the way to try to get it back, I believe,” she said. “That’s my big vision.”

Amid questions surrounding school funding at the state and federal level, Way said Tustumena will continue to use the resources available to provide the best education to its students.

“We still have Title I funds, and we will continue to use them to bring in music in residency and art in residency,” she said. “We’ve had such wonderful feedback from the kids and from the parents that I don’t want to see it go away. If that’s how we have to get it done, we get it done that way.”

“I’m just really grateful that I get to do this,” Green said. “This means that 200 kids get to have music, for the rest of the year, that didn’t have it. That’s a miracle.”

For more information, find “Tustumena Elementary” on Facebook.

Reach reporter Jake Dye at jacob.dye@peninsulaclarion.com.

Kindergartners participate in a music lesson led by Delana Green at Tustumena Elementary School in Kasilof, Alaska, on Friday, March 21, 2025. (Jake Dye/Peninsula Clarion)

Delana Green teaches music to second graders at Tustumena Elementary School in Kasilof, Alaska, on Friday, March 21, 2025. (Jake Dye/Peninsula Clarion)

A second grader participates in a music lesson led by Delana Green at Tustumena Elementary School in Kasilof, Alaska, on Friday, March 21, 2025. (Jake Dye/Peninsula Clarion)

Second graders participate in a music lesson led by Delana Green at Tustumena Elementary School in Kasilof, Alaska, on Friday, March 21, 2025. (Jake Dye/Peninsula Clarion)

Delana Green teaches music to kindergartners at Tustumena Elementary School in Kasilof, Alaska, on Friday, March 21, 2025. (Jake Dye/Peninsula Clarion)