Sarasota Orchestra and Manatee County Schools invited to Yale Symposium on Music in Schools

The arts are an essential tool in education. Whether it be visual art, theater, dance or music, the arts play a key role in educating and forming the developing minds of elementary, secondary and college-aged students. And Yale University's School of Music invites educators and professional music organizations from around the country every two years to see where music's place is in the educational  dialogue.

The Yale Symposium on Music in Schools is a biennial conference held on the New Haven, CT campus with the express purpose of gauging what's working and what needs to improve among the leading educators and music professionals in America. This year's conference will focus on the theme of partnerships between professional music organizations and public school music programs. And in the that vein the Sarasota Orchestra and the Manatee County Schools were invited to send representatives to the prestigious symposium. 

Alyson Rozier, the Sarasota Orchestra's director of education, and David Pope, director of orchestras at Manatee High School, will represent their respective organizations that the conference. Occuring from June 4 to 7, Rozier and Pope will travel up to Connecticut all expenses paid and converge with music education representatives hailing from California, Colorado, Washington, D.C., Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, New Mexico and North Carolina. The storied body of musicians and educators will discuss music activities for students, the positive gains of the school-professional organization partnership, and how these partnerships influence and aid public school music curriculum.

"The really good part is that if you’re struggling with certain things and you have trouble, someone at the symposium might have already figured out a solution," says Rozier. "We'll talk about how to support the arts, education and testing. One of the their focuses is that you participate in the symposium and share what you have learned. The great thing is that we’re bringing back all this knowledge back to the Sarasota-Manatee area and expand on what we’re already doing."

Along with knowledge and new professional connections in the music education sphere, Rozier and Pope will recieve the Yale Distinguished Music Educator Award. Featured speakers at this summer's conference include Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and Yale professor David Lang, MacArthur Fellow Sebastian Ruth, and former deputy-managing editor of the "Wall Street Journal" Joanne Lipman. All three will discuss and address their experiences in music education. 

"One of the things that will be good is that for a midlevel-sized organization like the Sarasota Orchestra is that they're in the schools and collaborating with the schools at all levels," says Pope. "One of the things I try to do is stay involved in professional development so I can become a better teacher. This symposium is a learning opporutnity that can't be matched. I see myself as a realtively young teacher, so it's great anytime when I can pick anybodies brain and bring it back to my classroom."