If Brandon Karn hadn’t joined the North Side High School band more than 15 years ago, he probably would have fallen through the cracks.
That’s his own assessment. “You belonged,” said Karn, a 2000 graduate.
And when you were in the band, you had to get good grades. “If you were struggling, there were people to help you out.”
Band was the reason he got up in the morning to go to school, giving him near-perfect attendance.
The arts can get a kid to go to school and stay there. That is one of the reasons for “b instrumental,” a $3 million fundraising campaign announced in September by the Fort Wayne Community Schools Foundation. The goal is to put 3,300 musical instruments into the hands of seventh-graders at 11 FWCS middle schools. The idea is that those seventh-graders will play that instrument all the way through graduation.
Karn, who now stops by the band’s outdoor practices, would be just another high school story where music saves a kid – except today, school attendance is even more crucial. Attendance and, ultimately, high school graduation rates factor into a school’s grade in the state’s A-F accountability program.
Those two measures, plus standardized test scores, also factor into teacher evaluations linked to a teacher’s ability to get a pay raise.