A Deep Dive into the Band and Orchestra Program Cuts

The Watauga High School orchestra performs at the Holiday Kaleidoscope Concert on December 18, 2025. Some of the orchestra classes that were previously separate have been combined this year and contain students from a variety of grades and skill levels. Photo Credits: Amelia Bennet, Watauga Yearbook

Edie Berke, Staff Writer for The Powderhorn

Last May, the band and orchestra programs at Watauga experienced a major downsizing. Mr. Will Selle, the previous orchestra director, left the high school to teach full-time at Hardin Park and Blowing Rock, and Ms. Taryn Wooten, the band director, took on his role. Since then, the programs have undergone many more changes, ranging from the class scheduling to the content. How have these changes affected the classes over the past year? How have they affected the students? And what do they foretell for the future of the music department at Watauga?

Before the downsizing itself can be discussed, it is important to first understand what caused it. Wooten traces the cuts back to the COVID-19 pandemic and the effect it had on both middle and high school music programs.

“During that time, so many things were changed,” said Wooten. “Our students weren't really allowed to play inside for a while, and it’s cold here, so we couldn’t do it outside. It wasn't as interesting because you couldn't do what you needed to be able to do. And so that kind of trickled up from the K-8s into the high school three or four years later.”

Lower demand for and less participation in band and orchestra classes meant that fewer teachers were required to be present in the room with them, so when Selle left in 2025, his position was not rehired as a cost-cutting measure. However, as COVID’s effects have begun to fade and more students are taking up instruments, Wooten has faced an increased workload.

“I'm running two programs,” said Wooten. “And I’m programming not even for two different ensembles, but for a marching band, a jazz band. a concert band, an intermediate orchestra, and an honors orchestra. That’s a lot of literature. So it’s difficult just having the time and the bandwidth to be sure that I do everything that I need to do.”

In addition to the loss of an orchestra teacher, many of the band classes have been combined. The lack of differentiation means that most band students, no matter their skill level, are all grouped into one ensemble containing a wide variety of skill levels. Wooten claims this consolidation has been more detrimental to the students than to her.

“Since we've combined those [classes], it's harder to give everybody the attention that they need to meet them at the level that they're at,” said Wooten. “You can't really go super in-depth on the high-level topics, because the freshmen are lost. And you can't spend a ton of time on the basics with the freshmen, because then your juniors and seniors are losing it and getting bored.”

As they have been combined, some classes like jazz band have been shortened from yearlong A/Bs to a single semester. Due to these cuts, students lose not only time to learn and play their instruments, but also unique opportunities to connect with more experienced musicians, perform for the community, and support Watauga’s music program.

“Normally, we have jazz band all year, like an A/B class,” said Wooten. “It’s great, because then the students get to play the holiday music and they get to do stuff in the fall, but then they're also here in the spring. We usually do a performance over on King Street at the Appalachian Theater. We combine with a community jazz band called Swing Set and the two jazz ensembles from App State’s School of Music. They run it sort of as a fundraiser for us, so they sell tickets, and then we get some of the proceeds to go towards our program to buy new music, or get instruments repaired, or whatever we need to use it for. We weren't able to do that this year because we didn't have the class this semester.”

The loss of opportunities such as these could discourage students from taking music classes. If it doesn’t, A/B pairing issues might be enough to tip the scales. The changes made to the A/B schedule for the 2026-27 school year reduce the options for classes that can be paired with band or orchestra classes, which can make it difficult for students to fit in music while still completing their core requirements.

“If you keep paring down options in the A/B schedule to where there are fewer classes, students are not going to take [band or orchestra], because they're not going to waste a class on something that they don't want to do just so that they can take an orchestra or a band class,” said Wooten. “There needs to be enough options for them to pick something that they want to do that's relevant and going to count towards their graduation.”

As students are facing reduced opportunities to join the band or orchestra programs, they are also losing an opportunity to become better prepared for adult life. Learning how to rosin a bow or read music can teach them some of the valuable life skills that are so desired by employers and crucial to daily life. 

“It teaches the collaboration skills that they're going to need for the future,” said Wooten. “They have to be able to communicate. They have to be able to work in groups. They have to be able to set short-term and long-term goals. They have to be able to have the tenacity and the grit to keep working at something even if it's not good at first. And those are all things that performing and visual arts teach.”

What concerns Wooten the most is not that students may not learn how to play instruments, but that they may not learn how to be better people. The arts, beyond teaching people how to harness their creativity, provide the foundation for a well-rounded, open-minded individual who can interact with anyone, no matter their differences.

“I think that without the arts, our humanity is bound to just fall apart,” said Wooten. “It's how people connect. It's how people connect across language barriers, and religious barriers, and race barriers, and wealth barriers, and all sorts of things. Everybody enjoys music, and everybody enjoys acting, and movies and shows. We have to be sure that carries on. We have to be sure that it exists in the future, because that's a thing that AI cannot do.”