Can’t Stop the Beat
Reflections on the 2021 Virtual Student Conference & the End of a Term
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hen Lacey and I started our to-do list for this year’s honor choir, we knew we were in for a challenge. Covid case numbers started rising in July and August, so we decided to forego an out-of-state conductor and schedule two in-state conductors. Cases kept climbing, so we started thinking and talking about what we could do. Could we have two sites? What kind of spaces can we use? How many kids can we really fit six feet apart? What if we have kids in the auditorium seating? What technology and licensing would we need to live stream? Can we make this a one-day event? What about air exchange requirements? What about feeding the kids lunch? So we switched our thinking. In the end, the NDACDA board came up with an exciting idea: a conference for the students. We teachers get to go to conferences. We get to hear speakers give us practical advice and inspiration. We get to interact with people we otherwise wouldn’t be able to. We get to hear professionals perform. I think it’s easy to forget that our students don’t usually get those opportunities. Instead of trying to create an approximation of our normal event, we wanted to take advantage of our unique situation where students have even more access to devices and people have frequently been connecting through virtual events. We held auditions as normal, due in mid-October, but we waived the audition fees. Our auditions were down; typically we get 650-700 auditions from 65-70 schools, but this year we only had 403 auditions from 51 schools. Some schools that typically send in only a few sent in a bunch of auditions. Maybe you were using these auditions as your singing content in class as you were social distancing or your school didn’t allow group singing. Some schools that typically send in dozens didn’t send any. Maybe your schools didn’t let you sing or weren’t going to let you travel to an event anyway. Maybe your students’ parents weren’t going to let them go to an honor choir. Maybe if you had known our plans (or we had known our plans at that time) it would have been different. We are sure there were as many circumstances as there are schools, and we hope that auditions go right back up to normal. On Friday, February 5, we held a virtual conference for the 250 students (190 accepted formally to a choir plus we were able to include the 60 students named alwww.ndacda.com | 7
