I don’t understand why you’re getting the principal involved. Have you had discussions with the teacher?
You seem to be trying to tell the teacher how to do her job. Would you like it she came to your job and told you you were doing it all wrong? Do you have a degree in music education? If so, do you like it when parents tell you how to do your job?
I was in choir in high school (~1200 students), and we had multiple choirs to deal with just this situation. There was a big general choir, an all-female choir (because of the gender disparity in trying out for choir), and an exclusive ~12-person “swing”/etc choir that did some choreographed dance moves, etc. with songs. It’s been a long time but I think there was a “newbie” choir group too that typically freshmen/sophomores were in as well. The special choir group had their own class period plus special practices after school.
Same thing with band - there was an entry-level band that anyone could start in, then you had to try out to move up to the general band, plus there was a chamber strings group.
I think I understand the sentiment in the letter (and seriously, TL;DR), but man, that was not the way to express it.
If I were to write this letter, I’d probably boil it down to (bolded mine, non-bolded from the original letter, apologies for any mis-coding):
Dear Principal:
My daughter had planned to discuss this with Choir Teacher but she has not been available at the times she had previously stated she would be, and I have been unable to contact her as well, so I am asking you to look into this situation.
Choir Teacher has promised her Chamber Choir students that she will be present for them at an after-school Choir rehearsal “every other Friday.” She has not followed through on this promise. There has not been a SINGLE after-school rehearsal of the entire Chamber Choir.
Choir Teacher has apparently announced that she is planning to incorporate the entire Mixed Choir into Chamber Choir when the spring semester begins. Considering that the Chamber Choir is supposed to provide more advanced choir students with singing experience designed to suit their ability, I am at a loss to understand why she would do this. Is it due to budget cuts, or perhaps other reasons like trying to correct the unbalanced gender composition of the Mixed Choir?
I am concerned about the lack of communication with parents and students on these important issues.
I welcome your thoughts, and look forward to knowing what action you are prepared to take.
Very Truly Yours,
(etc, etc)
And if he already has your email address, probably has you junk-filtered. The length-to-content ratio of that letter alone paints you as a helicopter parent at best, and at worst a bit of an obsessive crank with way too much time on his hands.
Glaze donuts, not eyes.
Do you propose not having a school play? 'Cause not everybody can be in that either, the stage would be rather crowded. The performing arts world is made up of tryouts, and high school is hardly too early for a kid to get used to that kind of thing.
My own high school had several choirs, some you had to try out for and some not. A couple of groups were awfully awfully good, and pretty darned difficult to get a spot in. If you didn’t, you had your choice of other choirs; nobody who wanted to sing and had room in their schedule was turned down. The select choir wasn’t a bastion of exclusionary elitism, it was something to aim for.
So he won’t bother reading it either?
As someone who coaches a rather successful high school debate team (about 80 kids a year): this.
There’s nothing that gives me a bigger headache than overly verbose letters from parents declaring how their special snowflake is the greatest and needs all of my attention— and how dare I not give that attention to them?! These letters almost always have crazy non sequiturs, like comments about the parent’s political affiliation or other fun things. If you take longer than 12 hours to respond to the email, you generally get two or three increasingly hostile emails asking why you haven’t responded yet. Even if their original email was sent at 11 PM on a Saturday on Labor Day weekend (no, really, this happened once).
In my 8 or so years of coaching, I’ve only had a small handful of these parents, but they immediately go into my “Crazy Pants” mental file— and I keep them at arm’s length.
Here’s the thing I’ve learned over the years: usually, kids either aren’t honest with their parents or don’t know the whole story. Or both, actually. Every single time I’ve gotten one of these hostile emails, it’s been from a parent who was getting less than half the story from a misinformed 15 year old. Your concerns about practice are especially legitimate, but a polite inquiry about that directly to the teacher would have been better suited, imo.
That letter is kinda nuts.
The rule is, choir practice last Friday and choir practice next Friday-never choir practice this Friday.
A learning experience for the OP. Next time run the letter by us *before *sending. 
I thought you were joking. Then I went back and actually looked at the OP that I originally TL;DR’ed. :eek:
Holy shit dude, learn about bullet points and summaries.
It makes a great rant, but if you actually want to accomplish something, being short and to the point is much more effective.
If you don’t get an answer from the principal, its because you lulled him into a coma with that tome. Jezus.
I learned that complaint letters need to be very short, and have three simple parts:
kaylasdad99, I like you a lot. But why the hell would you share a letter like this with us when you were just going to send it anyway?!
Not only is it too long, but it’s evidence that you are too involved. Why should you care about what sounds like a voluntary social outing? And you are only getting one side of the story–presumably your daughter’s. You do realize that high school kids have a tendency to exaggerate and leave out details, right? It may be that the principal instructed the teacher to do what she did so as to ward off some parental fussiness from the opposite side of the coin. Did you ask her what the deal was?
Regardless, it’s old shit anyway. I have no doubt that a teenage girl would still be fuming over it, but it’s really a trivial thing to bring up in a letter challenging a professional’s competency. I would have focused on your concerns about the low frequency of rehearsals and left it at that.
So what exactly do you want them to do?
Your letter sounds like a big whinge, I get your concerns but really I would throw this away and not engage with you as I can see a can of worms.
Okay, I’m known on several of these boards for being astoundingly verbose.
Dad99: you put me to shame.
Everyone else: I apologize for my previous thread-killing dissertations.
But I read it all, and all on the first pass.
Here’s what I’m getting:
Kayla says the new choir teacher…
The new choir teacher has also turned a student’s privately organized event into a we’re-all-crashing-your-party farce. That’s overstepping his/her authority.
This seems to be somehow related to the prior choir director’s scandal.
[Root Cause analysis seems to suggest certain practices; the dilution of the superior ensemble is designed to prevent recurrence?]
Dad99 disagrees with the current choir teacher’s…
Ultimately, he’s asking the principal…
“How do you expect this school to get another excellence award in this field if the teacher is undermining that excellence?”
-----G!
BTW:
You don’t let everybody play varsity soccer; you don’t let everybody argue on the debate team; you don’t let everybody in on the wrestling team. An “elite” choir is no different than a varsity football team: you don’t move up from JV until you prove yourself worthy. Any school that wants to compete (i.e. make a name for itself) will separate the higher- and lower-quality performers, and the higher-quality performers get more support so they can make a name for the school. This is done in the school’s best interest, not the student population’s best interest. It’s not about equality or egalitarian principles; it’s about schools competing against each other.
And this is not just about a bunch of kids warbling together. As with better sports teams and better performers on those teams, college scholarships may be at stake.
Meh. I’m not sure why you know or care so much about this situation. I was in band in high school. Although our program was decent when I started, it sucked major ass by the time I left–largely due to a succession of increasingly-terrible band directors. I didn’t complain about it to my parents, and anyone who did would be really weird. It really sounds like you have a lot of your own esteem wrapped up in your kid’s vocal success (or lack thereof). But frankly, arts budgets are terrible and getting worse everywhere. If you’re honestly this worried about improving your daughter’s vocal ability, get her some private lessons. If you’re not concerned enough to pay for that, why are you doing this?
If your daughter was that good, she’d have people paying her to sing at their institution by now.
If the chamber choir is a nationally competitive choir where a significant portion of students can expect singing scholarships and careers, then it may make sense to dedicate a disproportionate amount of resources on a smaller group of high-achievers. But if this choir is not advancing student’s scholarly or career prospects, then it’s an enrichment activity and those resources might be better spent across a larger group of interested students. Rewarding excellence is nice, but a large public high school is going to have all kinds of people who excel at everything you can think of, and they just don’t have it in them to function like a private academy for every one of those interests. Public schools can’t be in the business of giving semi-private coaching to everyone, especially in things that don’t tend to lead to scholarships.
It seems to me like the previous teacher had a special interest in the chamber choir, and put a lot into it. I’d also guess that a lot of the work she was doing towards that end was essentially volunteer work for which she was not compensated and probably had to reach into her own pockets to finance. I know my drama teacher (who put in probably 15 hours a week of extra work) got an extra $600 for the entire year for the work she did. Sometimes you get a teacher who is having enough fun with it that they do all the work anyway. Sometimes you get one who is more of a 9-5er.
It’s a new teacher, she’s running a new program, and the old choir is no longer. It was nice that your daughter was getting singing-academy level service at discount prices, but if she wants that service now she’ll probably have to look privately.
…and you don’t mess around with Jim.
Bolding mine.
Sure we do. It’s a public school and every student should have opportunities to participate and compete. Part of the lesson I am teaching the students as a coach is how to work as a team and that, in real life, working as a team means working with people of all abilities. Sure, we make exceptions and allowances for the less talented kids, but this isn’t Olympic gymnastics or something. Unless the OP’s kid is in some weird real life version of Glee, I’m sure the choir isn’t actually that serious. You might say my attitude is hurting my team’s ability to win, but in my experience, it’s the exact opposite (toot toot!).
Debate season is from August until June. We have 3-6 hours of after school practice each week and our tournaments frequently go 15 hours (just about every other Saturday). Four to five times a year, I take the kids out of town where I am responsible for them 100% on my own for anywhere from 3-7 days (3 days being the average invitational, 7 days being Nationals in another state). When we are out of town or at tournaments, I have to pay out of pocket for all of my meals (and often times I end up paying for a few of the poor kids to eat, too). My coaching stipend? $1600. For the whole year.
Nobody is doing this stuff for the money. If the new teacher isn’t all heart and soul into the choir, I suspect she probably took it on so she could have a regular teaching job. Often times, new teachers have to agree to do all kinds of extra nonsense just to get the regular teaching job they want.
You’ll get a polite response, but to be frank operationally it’s a gushing diarrhea of a letter. It comes across as petty and entitled. I’m sure it made you feel better having glurged all this out, but if you read this coming from another parent writing on behalf of their very special child regarding subject X and teacher Y you’d be wonder what this crazy parent as going on about.
You don’t want to be that guy, but in this letter you are that crazy parent guy.