Band benefits from enthusiastic leader

GHS facility on par with many larger districts

By Pete Kendall/reporter@trcle.com

Nothing is wrong with the old Godley High School band hall that a little extra space and technology wouldn’t fix.

Make that a lot of extra space and technology.

With about an $4.1 million outlay from the recent bond issue, Class 2A Godley put itself on a musical par with the majority of Class 4A and 5A schools in the area.

Director of Bands Jeff Henry is beaming. You can tell his students are excited because program numbers reflect a popularity in band unmatched at virtually any other 2A school.

Henry, in his fourth year at Godley, isn’t the type to brag. No need because his superiors heap praise.

“Talk about a great guy,” Assistant Superintendent Joe Danna said of Henry. “He started out with 20 something in the band, and now we have over 100. Did I tell you he also helps the football coaches mark the field and cut the grass? His reasoning is, ‘Our kids use the field, too.’ That’s the kind of guy he is.”

The interest in music at Godley stems from Henry’s enthusiasm, Danna said. “He’s excited about everything — facilities, kids. The people have embraced him.”

Now, they can embrace a blue-ribbon facility of some 15,000 square feet.

The band hall is 4,800 square feet, leaving 11,000 square feet for support facilities such as practice rooms for small groups and ensembles.

One innovation is a spacious room for instrument repair. Henry is a repair technician himself.

Next semester, he’ll begin training interested students in the art.

Mostly the new band layout is about technology.

“We are all about the technology at Godley,” Henry said.

Take the room where sheet music is stored and copied.

“We have laptop computers in all the practice rooms,” Henry said. “We have software we’ve bought for them called Finale. It allows the students to compose music and have a virtual band play it back to them until they get it the way they want. Then we print the music they’ve composed so we can perform it. We had a student last year, Stephen Jusko, who wrote an original composition we debuted at our spring concert two years ago. It was beautiful.”

Using technology, Godley students can mimic various acoustical surroundings in audition rooms.

Want the room to sound like the Bass Hall? Done. Want it to sound like a circus barn? Ditto.

“It’s a virtual acoustical environment system,” Henry said. “It changes the way the room sounds.”

Then there’s the Smart Music software.

“It allows students to come in and practice music,” Henry said. “The computer analyzes what they’ve played and highlights all the notes they missed in red. Then they try again. It allows them to have a private teacher. And they can access this software from the house if they have Internet. It’s as though they were here at the high school practicing. Once they get above 90 percent accuracy rate, they hit a button and send me the sound file.”

Godley band students are hardly music nerds. They mingle well with others.

“We attend all playoff games in all sports if the opposing coaches will allow it,” Henry said. “If we’ve got a kid going to state, we line up and play in front of the school for a big sendoff.”

The Godley band program didn’t become this overnight.

“We have 106 kids now. When I got here, we had 36,” Henry said. “The very first year, I asked them whether they wanted to be a competition band or show band. Overwhelmingly, they wanted to be a competition band. I said, ‘Then you need to know what you’re signing on for. The practices are tough.’ They were up for it.

“Our first contest, we didn’t do that well. We got [scores of] 3-3-3, which we should have. I still have the DVD of that. I show it to the kids to show them how far we’ve come. But we didn’t play easy music, either. We played challenging stuff.”

The Godley band advanced to regionals this year. Henry offers no apologies for not going beyond that level.

“Last year at UIL concert, we decided to do Class 3A level music, and we got straight 1’s,” Henry said. “This year, we decided to step it up a notch and do a 4A marching show. It was a tough piece of music. We ended up with [scores of] 2-2-2. We were a little disappointed, but in Texas it’s all about execution, not how hard the show is. But the kids knew they’d done a 4A show when everyone else was doing much easier things.”

The Godley band program will only grow better, it seems.

“The first three years, we didn’t have a single kid drop out of high school band,” Henry said. “I try to make it something they enjoy. At the same time, it’s going to be work. This year’s senior class was my first freshman class. We had eight kids in it then, and there are eight now. That’s the last small [band] class.”

That’s partly why Godley went big and state of the art with its new band facilities.

“If we were going to do something, we were going to do it right,” Danna said. “Some 4A and 5A schools don’t have it this good.”

Smaller can be better.

“We have an attrition rate of one or two band kids a year,” Henry said.

“We have a lot of kids doing things on Friday nights,” Danna added. “We have very few kids in high school who aren’t involved in an extracurricular activity.”