On the first day of school this year, music teacher Cindy Romphf’s classes were more arts-and-crafts than they were band.
Music classes full of students breathing hard into wind instruments posed a challenge amid a pandemic caused by a virus spread through droplets.
So Romphf’s students spent their first class cutting up material using templates Romphf had created to make covers for their wind instruments that would keep droplets in.
Using shoelaces, they tied the bell covers onto flutes, oboes, clarinets, saxophones, trumpets, French horns, trombones, tubas and bassoons.
“You can think of it like a mask for your instrument,” said Romphf, who teaches band and choir at Cedar Hill Middle School.
Students who play brass instruments are also using puppy pee pads on the floor to absorb the spit that collects inside the instrument, and teachers are keeping windows and doors open so air can circulate.
Students are spread out, and Romphf is holding choir practices in the school gym, where there’s more space.
Class sizes have been reduced, too, from up to 70 kids in one band class down to 30 this year, Romphf said.
Her students are now spending just 30 minutes, about half of each class, playing their instruments and singing, based on a recommendation in a study out of a Colorado university to cap rehearsals at 30 minutes. Romphf’s students spend the rest of the time on rhythm and listening exercises and music theory.
Romphf and other music teachers around the province are following guidelines put out by the B.C. Music Educators’ Association, spearheaded by Abbotsford teacher Janet Wade and Christin Reardon MacLellan, president of the Coalition for Music Education in B.C.
The association’s 54-page document, reviewed by the B.C. Centre for Disease Control and health officials, provides practical tips for teachers to conduct music classes safely, from how to choose a disinfectant for musical instruments to where to place and orient students to reduce risk.
Music teachers in B.C. became concerned about how to return to in-person band and choir practice safely after reports in the spring of a Washington choir that was called a superspreader event. The two-and-a-half-hour choir practice led to 53 cases among the 61 people who attended, and two people died. A U.S. Centers for Disease Control report found the virus likely spread because of a lack of physical distancing, “augmented by the act of singing.”
“So a lot of us were really worried because with our music classes, these classes mean so much to so many students. So we were worried that their mental health might be affected. And some of these classes, this is a reason why [the kids] come to school,” said Romphf, who is also the president of the Greater Victoria Music Educators’ Association.
In music classes at Belmont Secondary School, students who play wind instruments are all wearing masks while they play. Music teacher Mandart Chan said his students are cutting slits in disposable masks so they can fit their mouthpiece through the mask and play while their faces are covered.
His students are wearing the disposable masks while they wait for musicians’ masks, which cover the nose, mouth and mouthpiece, to arrive.
“They’re very similar to the fashion of men’s underwear, where there’s overlap. So where that overlap is — we’ve had a couple of prototypes where the student can put the mouthpiece in their mouth, but then the mask is actually wrapped around the mouthpiece,” said Chan, who is president of the B.C. Music Educators’ Association. “So that if anything were to be coming out the side, it still gets captured within the mask.”
Students who play percussion and string instrument are wearing non-medical masks during practices.
Chan said Wade and Reardon MacLellan led conversations with music teachers over the summer to figure out how they would need to adapt to the pandemic.
“It’s not going to be business as usual. But we found a safe way to do it,” he said.
