Music plays a vital role in cultures worldwide; shaping cultural identity, preserving traditions, and facilitating
communication and understanding across borders. It serves as a medium for expressing emotions, celebrating events, and transmitting knowledge and values across generations. There is much to be learned by students in the way this music is approached and practiced. It mirrors how many others around the world use music and provides contrast to the way western music is approached in typical school orchestra, band, and choir programs.
Using this non-traditional ensemble to create and perform music, students are guided by a teacher to learn the role of each instrument. Through guided facilitation of listening and responding, students create music in an exploratory way with both non-pitched & pentatonic-pitched instruments. Since the ability to read music is not a requirement, this ensemble provides opportunities to students who have not had opportunities in music and extends the learning of those who have by encouraging the true freedom of improvisation in a safe space.
This ensemble extends learning beyond the World Drumming Curriculum offered by Lincoln Public Schools. This fund will be granted to support the LPS West African Music Ensemble as designated by the fund administrator. Fund use may include (but is not limited to) instrument maintenance, member uniforms, supporting resources and materials, outside clinicians, leader training, transportation for community performances, etc.

Here's what your assistance could provide for our LPS students:
$50 - A traditional dashiki for student performance attire
$100 - New auxiliary instruments, mallets, or gyil stools
$500 - A new instrument - Kpanlogo drum or Gyil (West African Xylophone)
$1500 - Clinic experience (1-2 hours) with musician from Ghana or African ensemble
$7000 - Week long residency with master drummer from Ghana

🎨 No Waiting, Just Creating: Fund Full Class iPad Access ✍️
We are seeking essential funding to acquire an additional set of 14 iPads for the art department, complementing our existing inventory to finally achieve equitable access and full class participation in digital art and mixed media projects. While we currently possess 15 iPads with Apple Pro Pencils, this number is insufficient to serve a full class of students simultaneously, necessitating frustrating turn-taking and significant instructional delays. The funding for the additional 14 devices will allow us to immediately equip a standard class size, ensuring that every one of our 9th through 12th-grade students—who face diverse challenges—has hands-on access. This simultaneous access is critical, as currently, in one of my classes, only three students even have an iPad at home, highlighting a major technology gap. Integrating these iPads would allow us to utilize specialized features like pen display with pressure sensitivity, which provides a natural, intuitive way to draw superior to standard pen tablets. This fidelity is crucial for teaching professional skills using industry-standard apps like Procreate and Procreate Dreams. Crucially, this robust set of devices would be a shared resource available to the entire five-teacher art department, dramatically enhancing the scope and quality of our mixed media projects and digital art units for hundreds of students annually. We are requesting $8,792.00 plus cost reimbursement.  We thank you so much!

Through intentional recruitment and collaboration with the vocal music teacher, admin, and counselors, Park Middle School has seen huge growth in its band program during the past two school years! While this is great news, we are needing to assign students instruments that are currently over 50 years old and in poor playing condition. Our goal is to give as many students the opportunity to learn an instrument as possible by keeping instrument rentals easily accessible and affordable. Having instruments that are in good playing condition is imperative to the success of our students. Providing students with high quality instruments also helps build a culture of respect, confidence, and ownership in instrument care.

While Park Middle School is lucky to have many baritones in our inventory, three that are currently assigned to students are needing to be replaced after decades of use. The amount requested will be used to purchase three new euphoniums to replace these instruments in addition to covering the cost of repairs to instruments currently in our inventory. We are requesting $6,500 plus cost reimbursement for this support!