EFFORTS OF NOTE SCHOOLS STRUGGLE TO KEEP BANDS MARCHING.

Byline: Erik Nelson Staff Writer

CANOGA PARK - Despite a cracked drum, dented sousaphone and a saxophone strapped and taped together, the Canoga Park High School band marched to second place in the Los Angeles Unified School District marching band championship.

Their safety-pinned uniforms and decades-old instruments are emblematic of the cleft that separates well-to-do high school bands from those like Canoga Park's. Music directors across the region cheer the growing popularity of school music curricula, but say budgets aren't keeping up and decades-old instruments are falling flat.

``It's kind of discouraging to compete against schools that have better equipment,'' said Canoga Park drum major Jose Morales, a junior.

Shortly before the Los Angeles City Championship last Saturday, the marching band competed in a regional contest that pitted them against Nordhoff High School in Ojai.

Canoga Park music director Richard Kravchak and Nordhoff director Bill Wagner compared notes.

Nordhoff gets between $5,000 and $10,000 a year for instrument repairs and replacement, while Canoga Park has to make do with its ``instructional materials'' budget of $300 to $500 a year. Boosters raise other funds for operating expenses, such as travel, uniforms and entrance fees. This year, that's less than $6,000 for Canoga Park and around $45,000 for Nordhoff.

The difference is made up by boosters relying on the generosity of the schools' communities, and by donations expected from each band member.

At Granada Hills High School, which at 170 members has the LAUSD's largest marching band, members donate $150 each.

``The secret is partly that some of our kids come from a very affluent area, like Porter Ranch,'' said band director Al Nelson, who also gives much credit to the dedication of parent boosters whose annual contributions he declined to disclose. But then the school goes to regional contests where ``we're competing with high schools that are spending between $100,000 and $500,000 a year.''

Bridging the income gap at schools like Canoga Park, where most students qualify for subsidized lunches, sometimes requires assistance from the local construction site.

Three weeks ago, one of the hardened steel brackets holding a four-drum set to a fiberglass harness broke just before a performance.

Band members instinctively called for senior Oscar Cordova, aka ``Mr. Fix It,'' and senior John Phu, alias ``The Handyman.''

The pair consulted with construction workers for something similar, and they were given a length of steel rebar, which is normally used to reinforce concrete.

``We put it in a vise, and John and I put a pipe on it to bend it,'' Oscar explained. After bending progressively thicker lengths of rebar, grinding down their ends to fit in the bracket, not to mention several bloodied knuckles, the two fashioned two crude replacement bars.

Drums fit right in

The drums fit right in with the rest of the band instruments, which include a bass drum whose rim had snapped during practice the night before the Nov. 18 city championship, jury-rigged with two screws and a metal strap. There's also a 25-year-old baritone saxophone, some of its keys immobilized with plastic cable ties and sealed with black electrical tape to prevent air from leaking.

Doesn't that prevent all the valves from opening?

``We just skip the notes,'' explained Oscar.

``It can't play anything lower than a B because the pads can't seal,'' he said, pointing to a tone-hole socket covered by a misshapen gasket the color of dried blood.

It would take about $70,000 to replace past-their-prime instruments - one saxophone is 50 years old - Kravchak estimates.

And that's on the low end compared with the wish lists of many schools in low-income areas where parents can't afford to rent or buy instruments and boosters can't come up with the $5,000 it costs to buy a new tuba.

And repairing instruments can also be costly.

``We have a $600 repair budget,'' said Craig Kupka, band leader at Hoover High School in Glendale, which is also mostly lower-income. ``If you have a 25-year-old sax that needs to be reconditioned, that's going to cost you $300 to $400, so the repair budget doesn't go very far.''

In the LAUSD, it helps that there's a free Musical Instrument Repair Shop with 19 technicians to service the district's 88,000 instruments. The shop inspects and sterilizes 20,000 elementary instruments and 5,000 middle and high school instruments annually, according to director Stephen Riccobono.

But band directors complain of excessive waiting periods and the ``recycling'' for parts of instruments deemed too costly to fix.

At San Fernando High, which beat Canoga Park in Division 2 in the city championship, band director Roger Fletcher said it would take about $120,000 to replace worn-out instruments and allow more musicians to play for the fast-growing school.

``Last year, we were teaching a beginning instruments class and the one main band class, and we didn't have enough to really service the beginning instruments class,'' Fletcher explained. This year, there is no beginner class.

`Terrible situation'

``That's a terrible situation to be in,'' said Wagner, who like many school music advocates noted research that has shown far-reaching benefits from school music programs. ``New instruments excite students about performing and being in school.''

That belief has spawned a number of charity efforts to help disadvantaged schools replace instruments, said Don Doyle, director of the LAUSD's Division of Visual and Performing Arts, who acknowledges that the instrument/income divide is ``always the case, when you consider that we're an urban, basically low socioeconomic district.''

Sherman Oaks-based Mr. Holland's Opus Foundation was started by Michael Kamen, who wrote the score for the movie of the same name and many others.

The nonprofit's executive director, Felice Mancini, daughter of legendary composer Henry Mancini, praises the LAUSD's music program for its commitment to getting instruments even to elementary school children.

She added, however, that ``they have more and more kids, but they don't have enough instruments available, so they're turning kids away.''

The foundation is trying to help schools across the nation with its $500,000 budget - roughly equal to the LAUSD's new instrument budget - while the LAUSD alone needs to replace about $3.5 million worth of instruments.

Cable music network VH-1 gives the district about $200,000 a year for new elementary schools, and piano giant Kawai Corp. this year launched a $1 million nationwide school giving program that included new grand pianos for Van Nuys High School and Millikan Middle School in Sherman Oaks.

Although more than half of Hoover's students are considered disadvantaged, it has the good fortune to be in the Glendale Unified School District, which supplied the school with $30,000 for new instruments three years ago.

But Kupka said it will take at least five more years like that to bring his program up to date. He's reached out to the Mr. Holland's Opus Foundation, but ``we can't even get our phone calls returned.''

Mancini said, ``to have a budget of $30,000, that's outstanding. We tend to want to help out the ones that are a little more desperate.''

CAPTION(S):

2 photos

Photo:

(1 -- color) Canoga Park High School student Oscar Cordova, left, plays a saxophone that has been repaired with electrical tape. In the background, music director Richard Kravchak poses near band instruments students have had to repair themselves.

(2 -- color) Embroidery on Oscar Cordova's jacket identifies the Canoga Park High School band member as Mr. Fix It for his repairs to band instruments.

Michael Owen Baker/Staff Photographer