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A little bit of heaven in Canton
A little bit
of heaven came to Canton on Wednesday night, January 7.
Canton High
School’s auditorium was packed with families and friends to hear
Galvin Middle School students perform a winter concert. As a
former middle school principal and teacher, I have come to
deeply appreciate and revel in the energy that can come from
hundreds of young adolescents working together on a common goal.
And that is what I witnessed on Wednesday night.
Too many
stereotypes that are projected in the media give us the
inaccurate impression that middle school is a time when hormones
go wild and thus prevent pre-adolescent students from being
focused on achievement and serious accomplishments. My
experience has been the exact opposite. While it can be
challenging to harness the energy of middle schoolers or keep
them quiet and seated at all the appropriate moments, their
interest and passion for learning and achieving success is
boundless.
On Wednesday
night, I witnessed nearly 300 students, some tall, some short,
those who looked like adults, and those who still had not quite
entered their growth spurt, but all excited to perform their
song. Students were assembled in bands and choruses and each
group provided the appreciative audience with joyous music. The
excitement in their eyes, the lilt in their voices, the creative
melody of their solos, and the harmony of their sounds created a
warm joy on a rainy and dreary winter night.
As I sat in
the audience reflecting on what I was witnessing, I realized
that I was listening at one point to 99 seventh graders,
including a sizeable group of boys, perform Pachelbel’s Canon of
Peace. The thought struck me that a year ago, their counterparts
would not have had the same set of musical opportunities because
we could not support sufficient staffing at that time to serve
all the students at Galvin well. Instead, there was a hole in
the schedule that could only be filled with study halls.
A year later,
courtesy of the sacrifices and hard work of the citizens of
Canton, these 99 fortunate seventh graders, their nearly 200
peers who also performed in this concert, and the remaining
students at Galvin have gained enormously from the expanded
courses, the additional staff, and our ability to purchase new
music. All of this came about because of a passed override.
Most of us
have seen our financial investments, whether they were held in
stocks, bonds, bank accounts or deposited solely into the value
of our home, decline dramatically over the past few months. On
Wednesday night, I saw evidence of a sizeable dividend emerge in
the joy and beauty created in the CHS auditorium. It is a
dividend derived from an investment made by the citizens of
Canton in their public schools. This asset, which did not come
without a lot of belt tightening in other areas, has in a
relatively short time increased in value and has provided the
young people of this town with expanded opportunities to learn,
perform, participate, share, excel, and create a little bit of
heaven right here in Canton.
While the
current financial news is fairly bleak, I do, by way of this
essay, want to acknowledge the citizens of Canton for investing
wisely in their future.
January 15, 2009
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