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Letting The Music Breathe: How Science Got Music Back in School
32 Plays1 year ago
When COVID-19 caused schools to keep students of all grades at home, those arguably most disadvantaged by this were musicians. Many barriers stood in the way of getting students back in the music room: aerosolization from instruments and voice, close proximity between students, secretions from brass instruments, and antiquated ventilation systems in thousands of school buildings.
Early projections indicated that musicians would not get back in the room for 2 YEARS!
Well, that didn't happen, and our guests are a huge reason why.
Steven and Yasi talk to Dr. Mark Spede, Director of Bands and Conductor of the Symphonic Band at Clemson University, and Dr. James Weaver, Director of Performing Arts and Sports for the National Federation of State High School Associations. These two gentlemen collaborated on expedient and collaborative research that helped crack the code on how to play music in a post-pandemic school environment.
To read more on their groundbreaking research, go to https://www.nfhs.org/articles/unprecedented-international-coalition-led-by-performing-arts-organizations-to-commission-covid-19-study/
For more on National Federation of State High Schools' online education platform, go to https://nfhslearn.com/
For more resources, go to https://athletesandthearts.com/
Bios:
Dr. James Weaver is the Director of Performing Arts and Sports for the National Federation of State High School Associations. He has been a teacher and administrator at the district, state, and national level. As the Director of Performing Arts and Sports, Dr. Weaver oversees student participation, professional development, and awareness of performing arts activities throughout the nation’s 19,500+ high schools. Dr. Weaver has been a part of several national projects for performing arts educators including serving as the co-chair of the International Performing Arts Aerosol Study, creating copyright compliance resources, and developing national trainings for performing arts adjudicators. He most recently became the President of the National Music Council (NMC) in the Fall of 2021. Dr. Weaver specializes in educational administration and leadership focusing on professional development and teacher job satisfaction and retention. Dr. Weaver has degrees from Concordia College - Moorhead, Northern State University, and the University of South Dakota.
Dr. Mark J. Spede is Professor of Music, Director of Bands, Director of Tiger Band, and Conductor of the Symphonic Band at Clemson University. He is the recipient of the Clemson University 2009 Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching (College of Architecture, Arts, and Humanities), and three Clemson University Board of Trustees Awards for Faculty Excellence (2008, 2009, and 2012). He has served the College Band Directors National Association (CBDNA) in a number of capacities; he is currently national president. Dr. Spede previously served on the faculties at the University of Texas and the University of Florida and has degrees from the University of Michigan, Ball State University, and the University of Texas.
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Goals
00:00:07
Speaker
Welcome to the athletes in the arts podcast hosted by Stephen Karaginas and Yasi Ansari.
00:00:22
Speaker
Hi Ho again and welcome to the Athletes and the Arts podcast. I'm your host, Stephen Karaginas. My co-host Yasi Ansari is on assignment. We are a coalition of 20 different performing arts medicine and sports medicine organizations working together to improve the health and well-being of artists and athletes. So if you want more information or are looking for specific resources, go check out athletesandthearts.com.
00:00:45
Speaker
If you like what you hear today, please feel free to subscribe and leave a review.
Pandemic's Impact on Music Education
00:00:50
Speaker
So our show focuses on music, specifically high school and college musicians. Now, as you may recall, a pandemic came through our country in early 2020, leading to the shutdown of school districts all across the country.
00:01:03
Speaker
As we will talk about in greater depth, the biggest logistical nightmare in getting kids back into school was how to get musicians back safely into the music room. Now this presented all sorts of problems, from large groups of musicians sitting on top of each other in smaller rooms, singers in woodwinds propelling droplets with every executed note, brass players releasing secretions through their spit valves, to even the antiquated ventilation systems operating in the majority of schools across the country.
00:01:31
Speaker
Now, maybe students will get back to learning in classrooms somewhat soon, but folks fear musicians will be out up to two years. Well, that didn't happen.
00:01:39
Speaker
And the big reason for this was because of the work and research done by our two guests on the show today.
Expert Insights with Dr. Weaver and Dr. Speed
00:01:45
Speaker
We have Dr. James Weaver, Director of Performing Arts and Sports for the National Federation of State High School Associations. And we also have Dr. Mark Speed, Professor of Music, Director of Band, Director of Tiger Band, and conductor of the Symphonic Band at Clemson University. James, Mark, thanks so much for being on the show today. We really appreciate it.
00:02:04
Speaker
Great. Thanks for having us. Good to be here. James, first I wanted to ask you about your role as the Director of Performing Arts and Sports for the National Federation of State High School Associations. That sounds like a pretty huge role and pretty huge job. What does your work entail? The official way is I oversee the activities of music, speech, debate, theater, academic competition, cheer, dance, and for some reason, voice the cross at the high school space.
00:02:32
Speaker
So I have nine, oh yeah, nope. Yeah, we'll talk about that too if you want. So I have about 9.6 million students in the programs that I oversee at the national level. So with your position as director of performing arts for all these different organizations all across America, what kind of support are you giving to these programs?
00:02:54
Speaker
Yeah, so we really give a lot of support administratively. So we look at best practices that happens from state to state. We look at what do we make sure that people are there for corporate compliance issues, looking at what happens for participation components, what kind of program is the emerging programs, non-emerging programs, those kinds of things in order to really kind of allow for the state associations and the schools across the United States to provide the best
00:03:20
Speaker
the best experiences for the students they possibly can. Right now we're also doing a lot of things with workforce development and trying to get those areas for like music teacher shortages and what not to be solved.
00:03:35
Speaker
When schools are dealing with budget cuts, different states have different kinds of budgets and the way schools are funded varies across the country. What kind of support are you able to do as far as helping schools get funding or helping to try a level of playing field?
00:03:52
Speaker
So in that regard, none. And the reason I say is because there's a lot of different ways to do that. You know, most of the school's funding comes from their state legislature. And so we do provide advocacy support for them to understand like how to navigate state legislatures in that kind of area. But in reality, it comes from, you know,
00:04:14
Speaker
has to be done at the local level. And so if a national organization comes in and says, hey, you need to do this, at least in the United States, where local control is king, it becomes very difficult to have that kind of play. So we do a lot more of the best practices of like,
00:04:28
Speaker
how to build relationships with your school boards, how to build relationships with your state legislatures, how to build relationships with your governor's offices. And then we work with other national organizations to look at the national level of funding, advocacy, and things like that, which has been pretty successful as of late. So it's been good. It'll be interesting to see what happens as we enter into the next two-year period of time. But overall, that approach has been successful in the last several years.
00:04:56
Speaker
So is there any story behind why lacrosse got put under your purview with all these other performing arts and musical groups? Yeah. So my office is not just an arts office. We are a high school activities program office. So we oversee everything that happens in the high school space. So everything from basketball to football, lacrosse, cheer, dance, music, all of it is under our office.
00:05:20
Speaker
And yeah, my predecessors before me, or my executive director predecessors, they believe that my position needed to have access to a sport for whatever reason. And Boys Across was it at the time. And so I've carried that through. I've gotten rid of Girls Across, but I still have Boys Across and Cheer and Dance.
00:05:41
Speaker
I will say my claim to fame with boys across is that the injury rate has dropped by 40 percent. So I've taken over. So I have officially had an impact there that I had no idea that I could actually do. So it's been fun. Were you seeing the most success and with the concussions or with like lower body injuries or kind of across the board? I was accused of wasifying the sport of lacrosse. Thank you for tackling that because we took out like
00:06:09
Speaker
blindside hits and defenseless hits and things that should have been gone like 30 years ago. We took all those things out and it's amazing like hip injuries reduced and ankle injuries reduced and concussions reduced when you start taking out like defenseless hits. And I describe lacrosse as a, it's a contact sport, not a collision sport. And so when we approached it from that direction, we really started seeing a lot of injury rates.
00:06:38
Speaker
as we all know, a real man can take a defenseless blindside hits, right? I mean, I'm a bass player, so I took those my entire musical career, but yes.
00:06:49
Speaker
Well, that's amazing. Well, congratulations on that. That's amazing. I mean, having that kind of data, the support of the methods that you're using to help protect the sport is amazing. With girls lacrosse, are you seeing, there's actually, I actually did just a review day study for the clinical journal of sports medicine, talking about lacrosse differences with injuries and hockey.
00:07:08
Speaker
and different styles of that, with lacrosse being different for boys and girls as well, like helmet use. Did you see, were you applying any of these rules to girls lacrosse? And were you seeing a similar kind of decrease in injuries there? So luckily, not luckily, I actually stopped administrating girls lacrosse about five years ago. And so I don't know the data readily off the top of my head. Gotcha.
00:07:32
Speaker
OK, so Mark, you're with us today as well. And you have a very important role at Clemson University. So you are the director of bands, the Clemson Tiger Band, the Symphonic Band. So with all that going on right now at the end of a semester with a bowl game coming up, tell us a little bit about how your life is right now.
00:07:53
Speaker
Honestly, to tell you the truth, I just turned 60 on November 12th, and I am busier right now than I ever have been my entire life. I've got four major projects coming to a head right now. We're planning for a bold trip to take 350 people down to Miami. In two weeks, I have a board meeting for the College Band Directors National Association.
00:08:19
Speaker
I'm the president of that organization, so we have a four-hour board meeting. I'm putting the agenda together. And then following that meeting, we have a one-hour forum with the membership. And I'm also preparing for our national conference, which is in mid-February. I'm in charge of putting all the presentations together, hotels, all kinds of logistics. And my symphonic band is playing at our state convention
00:08:48
Speaker
on February 2nd, I believe. So I'm juggling a lot right now. Wow, that's a lot. So it must be difficult every year having to put an itinerary together for the marching band, because at the end of the season, you never really know where you're going until just a few days ago. So is this a constant chaos every year at this time for you? Yeah, absolutely. And even as many bowl games as we've been to in the last number of years,
00:09:19
Speaker
Even with repeated bowls, it's always slightly different. The dates change, the itineraries change, sometimes the funding models change. It's never a plug and play. I'll have itineraries from previous bowls, but they're never quite going to be the same. It's not quite starting over, but it's pretty close.
00:09:43
Speaker
So the marching band world, especially with the advent of YouTube and TikTok, we can talk about the competition within bands as far as competing for first chair, second chair, and all the exertion that performers go through. But just a competition among bands in the country,
00:10:00
Speaker
University of Michigan and Ohio State, for instance, are famous for their rivalry on the field and with their bands. So do you see that within your career that the level of the amount of pressure to become more competitive in what you do in marching band, is it getting bigger and more intense every year? Is it something that is hard to keep up with? Or is it something that you really enjoy trying to, you know, top yourself?
00:10:24
Speaker
Well, it's interesting the way you described the competition. We don't really compete with other college bands in our space.
00:10:32
Speaker
more geared towards entertainment during halftime. And most of the bands, when they do get together, it's a very, very friendly situation. It's not like, you know, it might be if, you know, people from the outside worry about, oh, we have to keep the band separate from each other because fights are going to break out. That doesn't happen. Right.
00:10:57
Speaker
You know, we get together frequently. In fact, this last weekend, we were together with the University of North Carolina marching Tar Heels. We did a joint pregame performance of the National Anthem. And we had a rehearsal at a local high school that morning and a luncheon together. We actually sat in the cafeteria of a high school and had a great time with each other, performed on the field.
00:11:19
Speaker
And it's very friendly in our space. But I will say that when you're going to see another major college marching band, and your two halftime shows are back to back, there's a little extra juice in there to make sure that- That's what I was referring to, right? Yeah, just like, oh my God, did you see what they did? Oh my gosh.
00:11:40
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. But I will say also, I'm just the kind of person that wants to do that, whether there's another band there or not. I try and set the bar pretty high for our group, help them achieve their maximum potential. And when that happens, I'm happy. When they fall short,
00:12:02
Speaker
then I know there's more work to do. So I keep the standard pretty high, whether there's another band there or not. And actually, I never speak about this to my band members. I don't really have to say anything. They know there's a visiting band coming. I don't use that as a motivational tool.
00:12:21
Speaker
For me, it's about intrinsic motivation, just trying to be the best that you can be because it's the right thing to do, rather than using an external motivation like, oh, there's another band here, or, oh, there's 80,000 people watching you, or there's a million people watching you on TV. I'm really focused on, at the individual level, you do your best, and then the group does its best.
COVID-19 Studies and Safety Measures
00:12:47
Speaker
So how have you gentlemen dealt with the COVID pandemic from two and a half years ago in terms of getting your bands to these organizations, all the different groups that you work with in the country, James, and then with Mark with all the different orchestras and sapphonic bands you're dealing with, how hard was it in the beginning to get playing again safely?
00:13:14
Speaker
The short answer was it was really difficult. Mark and I, as a lot of people know, we endeavor down this path of being co-chairs in the International Aerosol Study for the Performing Arts. I think honestly, if I would have known how much work it would have been when we started, I don't know if we would have actually done it.
00:13:37
Speaker
But at the same time, someone had to, and we were the ones that were like, yeah, we can do all this. That's not a problem. But you know, I think the short answer to that really is when we shut down in March of 2020 in the schools, we were told it was going to be two years or more until music was going to return back to the schools.
00:14:01
Speaker
I would say that for me, and I'll speak for Mark for a moment, even though I try really hard not to do that. When we saw that four and a half million high school students went back to music in the fall of 2020 in that first September back, that was shocking.
00:14:22
Speaker
And it was because of the, Mark and I put in a lot of 15, 20 hour days, we're pushing researchers in ways that I don't think they've ever been pushed before. Just enough to make them get all the work done, but not enough to make them pay us for eternity.
00:14:40
Speaker
When we opened up schools that fall, we ended up seeing four and a half million kids out of the six million kids in music come back. For me, that was a huge point of pride that we're like, look, we did it. We figured it out and kids are getting back in and it didn't take two years. To put that in perspective, if we would not have done what we did, kids would just be coming back into music classrooms today.
00:15:07
Speaker
And for us to put that into perspective, it gives me goosebumps just kind of thinking about it. Right. We've had a year and a half music making that wouldn't have happened otherwise. And so it was it was intense. And I think the entire for Mark and I, the entire pandemic experience for the first year was more than one word. And it was intense. Yeah, for sure. You know, as you say, getting back to normal, of course, the fall of 2020 was very
00:15:37
Speaker
interesting situation. At the college level, marching bands were not allowed to perform on the field. Many marching bands had a reduced presence at their football games. We were one of the lucky ones here at Clemson. We had a piece of real estate in our stadium where we could fit almost the entire band at a six foot spacing. By the fall of 21, we still had mitigations going on, not so much outdoors, but certainly indoors.
00:16:05
Speaker
And the one thing that I've done with my group is no more indoor rehearsals. We're exclusively an outdoor ensemble now with the marching band, just because having that many bodies in a 3,000 or 4,000 square foot space is not safe, no matter what pathogen you're talking about, whether it was a flu virus, COVID virus, whatever it might be.
00:16:35
Speaker
And even this fall, fall of 2022, we had an outbreak at the beginning of the season as students were coming back from wherever they were over the summer, coming back to campus, and many other
00:16:51
Speaker
bands were having outbreaks right at the very beginning of the season. I haven't had a COVID case in the band program here at Clemson in at least two months. But there has been a pretty fair number of flu situations. There's a lot of strep throat. I've had a cold. I'm just getting over that now.
00:17:14
Speaker
a typical, I might get one a year or maybe one every other year, but I just am getting over it now. So there's stuff out there obviously, but we're sort of, I think we're all more cognizant of how to manage that now. And one of the most significant ones is ventilation in the indoor space and just being outdoors as much as possible.
00:17:41
Speaker
So let's go into the study a little bit more, the aerosol study you guys were involved with, especially since it has such an impact in getting kids back into playing music. So tell me about how you started and set up the study in the first place and what you guys found. Well, I'll give you the background. I was on sabbatical in the spring of 2020 when COVID hit, and I was really
00:18:11
Speaker
doing other things, but when I realized that music was in danger, I put out an email to about 16 different leaders of music organizations, James being one of them. We had met at a conference a couple of years earlier. And I said, is anyone aware of any studies that have been done on music and aerosol spread of pathogens?
00:18:37
Speaker
Because I had found one, a case of tuberculosis in a music classroom, a band class from 1950, somewhere around 1950. And other than that, there was nothing in the literature. So James responded right away. And he said, what are you thinking? And I said, I think we're going to have to do our own study somehow. We're going to have to figure this out. And he said, I'm in. Let's get started. And if it wasn't for James, I couldn't have
00:19:07
Speaker
We couldn't have done this. But yeah, I mean very quickly we had a meeting like within 48 hours of me sending that email and we had a plan in that first week and we were off and running. Wow, impressive.
00:19:25
Speaker
Don't let Mark say that it's all me. The other thing is he had 300 articles in a folder and he's like, read these and tell me that we can't figure this out. I sat up for 18 hours reading all these articles, Mark said, I'm like, holy crap, I think this is the thing. Then we went through and figured out how to find some researchers, which that was all on Mark because I don't know anybody.
00:19:54
Speaker
Um, and then we use those contacts to find, uh, Dr. Miller and Dr. Sribrink and we're off to the races and, you know, really like Mark was the idea guy. And I'm like, I've got some administrative punch behind me with the office that, you know, was basically looking for big things to do. And so it was a hundred percent a team effort. So.
00:20:18
Speaker
Take us through the basics of the studies, like what you were looking for and the basic results that really impacted how bands and musicians play. Well, James mentioned that we were reading studies and it was very clear to us in late March, early April of 2020 that this virus was an airborne virus. And it was very, very frustrating
00:20:47
Speaker
Speaking for myself, it really incensed me that the WHO and the CDC were so reluctant to come out and say what was obviously the case. I mean, the examples in the music world, as many of
00:21:05
Speaker
many people know were these choir outbreaks, mass outbreaks where 80% of the people in a choir room contracted COVID within a few days of that rehearsal. You can explain droplets transmission only so far, but it was pretty clear from the literature that we were looking at and just looking at the news that this was an airborne virus.
00:21:33
Speaker
Right away, we were looking at measuring the amount of aerosol coming out of somebody's mouth when they're singing, coming out the end of an instrument when they're playing a brass or woodwind instrument. And that was really the focus of the study right away. It's like, OK, the virus is catching a ride on these tiny microscopic droplets coming out of your mouth.
00:22:00
Speaker
And what, you know, how bad is it? Like how much is coming out? We couldn't do any live virus studies obviously, especially in those early days when, you know, if you think back to April of 2020, it was a mad, mad, mad, mad world. People were frantically trying to figure out anything they could. But yeah, so that was our focus from the get go was aerosol transmission.
00:22:28
Speaker
So now with different instruments in the band, did you see a difference that surprised you as far as how far you can reject droplets like trombone versus clarinet versus flute?
00:22:42
Speaker
Well, I think both James and I were very, very surprised at the early results when we got them back. Both of us thought that the flute would be the worst offender, because the flute doesn't have anything in front of the mouth. The player is blowing right across the top mouthpiece, and their breath is going right into the room without any kind of barrier in the way. And so we thought the flute would be the absolute worst. And it turns out it was
00:23:12
Speaker
the least offensive in terms of aerosol. But yeah, some of the instruments did produce more than others, but they all produce some at least. So we were looking at a situation where
00:23:31
Speaker
at least in terms of wind instruments, it was looking pretty grim. And certainly in the choir world, we knew from the real world situations that were happening in March of 2020 already before the shutdowns that there was an issue there as well.
00:23:48
Speaker
So then what kind of findings did you have that, or I should say, from the findings you got from the study, what kind of changes were you able to make in the band rooms that would help musicians and singers get back in performing? Yeah, so I think the thing we needed to realize right away was Mark and I were very ready to take a bad answer, right? And say, okay, yep, there are some problems here.
00:24:17
Speaker
And we actually had, when we were developing the original support for the study, we had some people say like, we can't support you because we don't want to, what happens if it's bad? Like what happens if it says we can't do music? We can't have that. And Mark and I were very clear and I think very honest with each other saying that we need to know that too.
00:24:35
Speaker
Right. Like I never, uh, I'll say this anecdotally, then I'll go into what we actually found. Everyone, we put up our first round of results. I told Mark, I'm like, I don't know if I'm going to sleep because what if we, what if we're wrong and we just, we just killed a bunch of people in the classroom, right? Cause we didn't know how bad it was going to be.
00:24:52
Speaker
I mean, it turns out we weren't wrong, which was nice. But so what we came up with was a, again, brilliant scientist that we worked with. This is not a me and Mark thing. We're like, what if you do that? And I remember the first couple of things we threw out there, they're like, well, that's dumb. We're like, but wouldn't it be nice if it worked? Like sure it would be, but that's not how like physics work.
00:25:13
Speaker
So we had to get through some of that. But the big things we came up with was a list of, we wanted to do two things. One, make it stuff that was affordable and easy to get. And two, make sure that the recommendations were so simple and clear that it was like, do this, go back to the music classroom.
00:25:32
Speaker
I think by and large we accomplished both those goals. So a couple of things we had was one, increase the ventilation, right? A hundred percent. In fact, I was actually listening to a news article today on my drive down to Nashville that was talking about how, you know, masks are only so effective, but ventilation is the thing. And I'll say this in public setting, anywhere I have a chance to, we have under invested in ventilation for indoor air in this country for the last hundred years and is way past time for us to get over that.
00:26:01
Speaker
and properly invest in indoor ventilation. All right, now I'm off that soapbox. So go back to our five things, right? So it was increased ventilation, and Mark and I had a great recommendation we had using HEPA air cleaners for the size of the space you're using. And then we had all these calculations on how to figure that out and make sure you've got it.
00:26:19
Speaker
You can use portable units or internal units or whatever you need to do, but we gave you a ways to do that. The next thing was mask everything, right? So at the time, let's mask your instrument, mask a person, make sure we're doing things the right way. The next thing was distance. And this isn't the early end of the pandemic where the CDC was saying six foot. So we made a decision to not go against the CDC, but like in four, six feet. So we had some states that were saying, you know, if six feet is good, 12 feet is better.
00:26:48
Speaker
12 feet made no sense. I would talk to these departments of health and be like, well, why are you doing 12 feet? It's like, well, 12 feet is better. I'm like, but where's your science? Then my favorite part is like, where's your science saying six feet? I'm like, here's 300 pages of stuff. All kinds of science here. We were talking about six feet, we eventually reduced it down to three feet.
00:27:10
Speaker
Uh, and then we talked about general hygiene components, right? So making sure that your spit valves are just being like wafted all over the room. Uh, I'm sorry, water keys. Um, you know, making sure that they're, they're properly disposed of, that they're not just sitting in the floor and festering things up. Uh, which I think as a string player, we should be really good about that. Just kind of clean things up a smidgen. Um, you know, and then the other thing we had was time. And I think early on we were talking about being more restrictive than less restrictive.
00:27:40
Speaker
on time because we knew there was an accumulation factor that was existing. And so we had originally marked, I think, 30 minutes was our original one. And then we expanded to 45 to 50 minutes. And then we eventually got rid of the time aspect because as we were talking more and more about, again, ventilation, if your ventilation rates were high, you could do almost anything in time.
00:28:04
Speaker
We tried doing some correlation studies to see if we could get a CO2 measurement to equal out the aerosol stuff. Turns out CO2 is a lot lighter than aerosol particles, so you couldn't really get a good correlation on that. It's 10 o'clock at night, I'm sorry. You couldn't really get a good correlation on there.
00:28:26
Speaker
But what that did do is it set up some good ideas for us to look at overall air quality and saying, you know, if your CO2 level is raising your room, chances are your overall air quality is going to go down. And so we had some real science to show some stuff to like really make us.
00:28:44
Speaker
what I would call a healthier indoor environment overall. I think that if you were to look at the schools that opened with no mitigations, you saw a huge jump in viral cases. If you saw them open up with mitigations, you saw it slower. We proved that to be the fact in two different survey studies.
00:29:03
Speaker
One with just Mark and I and the statistician being like, oh man, this is great. And then one with Mark and I and the power of the CDC, which actually showed, I would say even more conclusively that these things worked in disease mitigations. And so this is the first time that I know of then all the literature review we've done.
00:29:23
Speaker
that we have had a, here's the problem in a music classroom with disease transmission, to here's a solution, to here's the results of that solution. And I think it's been, for me, I guess it really rewarding work, but those are the medications we came up with. And we get a lot of flack from some people saying, how dare you tell me what I have to do? But I think the vast majority of the community was like, we're going back to the classroom and we're only doing it because we finally have some science to back us up.
00:29:52
Speaker
Well, also the specificity of the recommendations too is one of the few things that I've seen over the last couple of years after reading your studies that where there was actually some science, there was science behind the, the, the problem, the plan, the solution and the results.
00:30:09
Speaker
all that together so people can have confidence in it. It's so hard to do that. Have you seen with all the schools that you survey across the country, are you seeing that schools are slow to adopt new ventilation systems? Are they resistant? Is it like just taking forever or is it everybody on board and going with it?
00:30:30
Speaker
I would say that, you know, all the money we spent on COVID as a country here in the United States, a lot of it was, you know, I mean, not to get political about it, but a lot of it was wasted. It should have really gone into ventilation. That is the key factor. As James alluded to earlier,
00:30:52
Speaker
I've become more aware, obviously, and I think many people have, that the level of CO2 in our indoor environments can rise pretty quickly if the ventilation is not good. And it rises above a level where competent learning can happen in a classroom.
00:31:11
Speaker
The scientists say that CO2 level of 1,000 parts per million is degrading your ability to comprehend. Sometimes we have 2,500 parts per million in a classroom. It's a big problem. If we had used all that money to better ventilate our indoor spaces,
00:31:36
Speaker
That would have been money way better spent than I think what we spent a lot of it on. And now we're behind. Now all that COVID money is gone. And here we are in the same place we were before the pandemic in terms of ventilation. It's really a problem.
00:31:53
Speaker
I mean, there's a study that came out, I would say, Mark, early 2021 that said if the U.S. were to spend $3 billion, which I know sounds like a lot of money, but in the U.S. world, $3 billion is nothing. It's not nothing, but it's not a lot in the grand scheme of the U.S. But if we spent $3 billion in just equipping every K-12 classroom with appropriately sized type of air cleaners, and then $300 million a year after that for replacement filters,
00:32:23
Speaker
We could watch childhood asthma rates drop by 30%. We could watch flu transmission in schools drop by 50%. Like these are like real, real tangibles. And for in the grand scheme of things, not a lot of money. But to Mark's point, we didn't really spend it that way. Now I will say that we did have a lot of schools that did invest heavily in capital outlay projects to go ahead and update their ventilation systems.
00:32:49
Speaker
But that was a lot of schools that had means, right? So they didn't have to spend those dollars on trying to do remediation for in-classroom time loss and those kinds of things. I'll just say selfishly, my kids go to a pretty affluent-esque, you can't see my air quotes in the podcast, but I'm using air quotes in the video, school district, it's a suburban school district and they went and invested tons of money into their air ventilation systems.
00:33:18
Speaker
and they have some of the lowest rates of COVID transmission and flu transmissions within the state because they have tons of ventilation going through there. No, it was also on their capitalized plan prior to the pandemic, but it helped to move those timescales up with some of the COVID money.
00:33:34
Speaker
But yeah, ventilation really is the ticket to everything, right? Makes sense, makes total sense. So you had two studies that we guys did? Yes. So what did the first study do and what did the second study look at? What was the difference? Well, the first study really looked at the amount of aerosol that was coming out of each individual instrument.
00:33:59
Speaker
you know, physical measurements, parts per million, et cetera, size of the particles, that kind of thing. Also some computer modeling of what these things might look like in a room. So real measurements in a lab and computer modeling and basically, you know, the mitigations that we just talked about
00:34:24
Speaker
and how that could minimize the effect of the aerosol accumulation. And then, James, the second study? So the second study really replicated the first study, but went after a totally different direction. And then, so we had two labs working at the same time with University of Colorado Boulder and the University of Maryland.
00:34:46
Speaker
Both of the same similar things that you can approach is in the second study we ended up doing those I think independent of the actual science was the review and the data collection of all the results of how it was used. And that's the kind of thing I said what we worked with the statistician on around one and we worked at the CDC on around two.
00:35:04
Speaker
I do think that even though one study with two parts, Maryland and Colorado, really did the scientific research on the physics of all of this, the air particles and everything that happens with all that. The other study we did was really the quantitative collection of the in
00:35:24
Speaker
I would say the practical use of the science. Those are both big. Amazing. All this time now, two and a half years after the pandemic started, where we are now, mitigations are in place now. Are we better off now in the music room? Are things working better than ever? Are there more challenges that the post-pandemic era has brought us? How do you see the state of things now and then coming into the future?
00:35:54
Speaker
with the music programs in schools? Yeah, I think in the K-12 space, what's been fascinating for me to watch is, again, depending on where you are in the country, because everybody had different approaches to pandemic. So some areas didn't use our medications at all. Some lived and died after the mitigation recommendations we had. What I'm seeing now, which is actually something that, I don't know, Mark, I'm going to laugh at this. I don't know if you remember me saying this back in August or September of 2020.
00:36:22
Speaker
But I kept saying, like, these mitigations are not just for COVID. They're for any respiratory disease that's flown around. And so what I'm seeing now, like, now that it's like fall musical season, I'm seeing lots of pit bands or pits, orchestra pits, and other things being like, you know what? We're two weeks from the show. Everyone needs to mask up. Everyone has been on bell covers. And let's just do that. And then we go to watching, like, what I commonly call pre-pandemic, the performing arts center plague, like, flow through the musical season.
00:36:52
Speaker
we're not seeing that anymore. And it's not that we're doing like crazy amounts of things to stop it. We're just using a couple of the mitigation measures. And we're seeing a lot of those disease mitigations work. And so I think in that regard, that's kind of kind of
00:37:10
Speaker
from research-wise, it's fun to see. But I think that those are things that if we can really get some good case studies out, we could actually see less and less respiratory disease that's going around some of those close contact music events. But yeah, so I think that's one area we're seeing now that it's not as widespread as I think we may would like to see. But at the same time, we're seeing more banned classrooms with HEPA air cleaners in them. We're seeing a lot of vocal classrooms, HEPA air cleaners in them.
00:37:39
Speaker
And so some of the teachers who are in that 15 plus range of teaching, who are like, you know what, my health is very important to me. And I want to make sure I keep going through retirement. We're seeing them use some of the, especially the ventilation mitigations continue on into use today, which I think is really good.
00:38:00
Speaker
And I think, you know, something else we haven't talked about really, it wasn't part of the study or anything, but certainly having gone through the pandemic, I think we all realize that our individual health plays a huge role in what these viruses do to us as individuals.
Health, Safety, and Student Well-being
00:38:21
Speaker
You know, we found out early on in COVID that it was really affecting the elderly severely, you know,
00:38:30
Speaker
20% kill rate or something, ridiculously high. And people with comorbidities. Diabetes was a big one. Obesity, all that stuff. And I've been on a
00:38:44
Speaker
personal health kick for the last 12 years or so, but it's really crystallized in my mind now that I'm 60, that my individual health, eating well, exercising, supplementing with vitamin D and a few other things is super important because
00:39:04
Speaker
you know, if you are exposed to these pathogens, your own immune system, if it's primed and ready to go, is going to be able to deal with it. And if you're, you know, if you're in a bad place to start with health-wise, you're going to be in trouble. So, you know, that needs to be the next part of our societal approach to diseases. You know, we as individuals need to take better care of ourselves.
00:39:33
Speaker
Yeah, that's one of the things that we talk about a lot with my patient population and work in the performing arts as well, is 95% of all COVID deaths occurred in people with multiple comorbid conditions and with obesity and diabetes and such. So, getting that information out there and making people understand that health and wellness is, I think this pandemic helps show that if you're healthy and well, then you're gonna be able to, even if you do get it, you'll be able to withstand it.
00:40:00
Speaker
So is the NFHS doing anything or having sort of like, um, like learning system that where you help to disseminate this kind of information to all the different programs all across the country? Are you guys doing anything like that? So we have, um, from the, from an aerosol specific stuff, all the information that Mark and I and our teams have worked on is still there. And I would say it's still valid and darn good information. If I say so myself, right.
00:40:27
Speaker
And I'm looking forward to some young whippersnapper researcher being like, you know what, I'm going after that using this as a baseline of knowledge for us. And I know those days are closer than we think. But that's still on the website and it'll live there forever. We'll memorialize that website and say, okay, yeah, here it is. As far as the other things go, you know, we have
00:40:50
Speaker
a very robust learning system that has all kinds of things on there from everything from heat, all those prevention, to student nutrition, concussion protocols, to copyright compliance, to everything that keeps you healthy as a body and out of the lawsuits in copyright land. I said it as a joke because that's how Morgan actually first met several years ago.
00:41:17
Speaker
was I gave a very terrifying contract compliance speech. But we have a, you know, it's quite a very robust system. And there's, I would like to say there's like 50 health and wellness courses on there for everything from like social media use to nutrition and everything in between. So yeah, there's a lot of information out there. And the nice thing is for all of our health and wellness courses are all free. And so we just want people to, to Mark's point, know what you need to do and then be ready to go out and do
00:41:46
Speaker
Excellent. So anybody like within the NFHS or people in general can access this? People in general, yeah. So we made sure that anything that has a health and safety component is just open and free. We do have some paid courses. There's like 30 some plus paid courses. You go to the auto like be a better baseball coach. You can pay $25 and figure out how to do that. But it comes to like keeping kids safe from heat illness on a marching band field or a football field or a baseball diamond. You know, those are all free because we want people to be safe out there.
00:42:16
Speaker
We don't want to put any barriers to finding ways to keep kids safe. One of the number one things that kids deal with as far as a fatality issue or a sub fatality issue is heat on those.
00:42:31
Speaker
And so if you look at the marching band, I mean, Mark knows this, it gets really hot in the summer, like in South Carolina, it's kind of a thing. And you know, football players, they have a, you know, we're going to rehearse it, we're going to practice at six in the morning and we're going to wait until eight o'clock at night and we'll come back. But the marching band is out there from nine o'clock in the morning until four o'clock in the afternoon. And their gear is hotter than the football players. And yet there's no mandate to reduce that.
00:42:59
Speaker
And so we want to make sure that everyone has the information they need to do as directors and students to say, yeah, let's make sure we're properly dehydrated, make sure we know how to take breaks, make sure we do those things. And those are all good free resources out there. So the health awareness continues well beyond COVID.
00:43:16
Speaker
Mark, being that you're the director of a Division I top flight marching band with the health and wellness aspect of things, do you find that post-pandemic your performers are more conscious of their health now? Are you guys making a concerted effort to help them become more aware of this? Is this part of their curriculum, so to speak, or what are you guys doing? Yeah.
00:43:40
Speaker
If we rewound about seven, eight, nine years ago, my personal health journey, I kind of tried to model it and not really talk that much about it, but just as somebody who was old enough to be their father, let's say, standing in front of them being their director, I wanted to model a lot of things, just being a good father, being a good husband, being a,
00:44:08
Speaker
you know a good ethical person but also uh... somebody who was taking care of themselves you know in as an individual so more recently i've become a little more proactive in that aspect and and this year we started a program with uh... uh... doctor eliot cleveland he he runs marching health dot com and he came out with his team and taught us a routine uh... you know a warm-up
00:44:36
Speaker
routine and just a physical preparation routine that was very short, but pretty intense. And as we did that every rehearsal, the health and stamina of the band increased. Now, the other thing that I've always pushed since I moved from the North and Midwest to the South, my first college job was at the University of Florida.
00:45:02
Speaker
And never having lived in the South and going through my first football game day in Gainesville, Florida, I was hit pretty hard by the heat. And I realized later that I wasn't hydrated. I was not drinking enough. I was not reproducing electrolytes or replenishing with electrolytes. So my students here at Clemson
00:45:25
Speaker
I'm sure they are. It's a running joke, actually. But the word hydrate comes out of my mouth at least 10 times a day. Every email I send to them, capital and bold hydrate. And really, we haven't had any issues as hot as it is down here. I always tell the students, if you're hydrated, the heat is uncomfortable. If you're dehydrated, the heat is dangerous.
00:45:54
Speaker
And it will take you out. So I think just drilling home that message constantly, we really haven't had too many issues. And we haven't really had any issues in the last, I'd say, four years. I haven't had a student fall out or pass out or anything like that. I've had it happen over the years I've been doing this.
00:46:19
Speaker
There was one particular case where we had to ice the person pretty quickly. We called 911 and they came rushing out. And it was a situation. The student actually had another comorbidity that I didn't know about that affected how she responded to the heat. But at any rate, I think there's lots of things you can do. If the heat index is too high,
00:46:46
Speaker
We need to think about what we're doing. Maybe it's time to go in the shade if we can, whatever the case may be. But hydration, I'm all about hydration and electrolytes. Right. What kind of health care team sports band medicine team do you have at Clemson with your organization?
00:47:07
Speaker
Like you have a trainer, a couple trainers with you. Are you your own team doctor or how do you guys arrange your medical care? Yeah, well, we have a number of students in the band who are nursing students, medical, you know, CPR certified. So we have student help. When we're on the road, we have a professional nurse with us that travels with us in case there, you know, any issue that might come up.
00:47:29
Speaker
But no, we don't have a dedicated trainer with the marching band. We do have access to the football trainers when we're on the road at an away game. And certainly, on campus here, there's any number of ways that students can get help.
00:47:48
Speaker
I think that's probably a wave of the future. Some marching bands are having a full-time person now who's just a health and wellness person. And the other aspect we should probably talk about is mental health. A lot of people, especially the younger people, are struggling right now. I'm seeing it at the college level. I'm sure James, the high school level is the same. But this generation who has gone through this, it's really affected them
00:48:18
Speaker
I think more than anyone, those of us who have some age on us, I think we're a little bit better equipped perhaps to deal with everything that hit us. But when you're an adolescent, this is traumatic stuff. And they're still finding their way out of this mess, I think. It's going to take a long time, actually. It's going to take a long time.
00:48:43
Speaker
But we're, you know, certainly at the collegiate level, we're all more cognizant of the mental health of our students and doing what we can to help them that way. I see a lot of issues with like anxiety, depression, what kind of. Yeah, all the above. And I think
00:48:59
Speaker
resiliency is a little bit down. I think, you know, taking a punch and being able to get back up right away is tougher for them. Yeah. You know, motivation, perhaps. I'm lucky because the kids who join marching band are highly motivated kids. So we are cranking away last year and this year, the two best bands I've ever had at Clemson. And, you know, I mean, it's just unbelievable to me.
00:49:29
Speaker
So I'm getting the cream of the crop, which I'm grateful for. Not to say that there aren't individuals who are having problems, but just as a general group, they're really great. But campus-wide, you see them in the classroom setting. My own children are college age. I see them in their peers.
00:49:53
Speaker
It's a different world for them. It's tough. I feel bad. I really grieve for this generation that had to go through this. Online teaching, teacher on Zoom, horrible way to learn and teach. It's really traumatic. It's going to take a long time to recover.
00:50:13
Speaker
Yeah, my daughter's yearbook was basically a yearbook in selfies. So looking at this issue with mental health, how do you see how do you guys see from your perspectives, the role of social media and all that because the big goes back and forth of like some folks find it as obviously very negative. But then there's also other folks, I say that there's also a place where folks can reach out and, and they find some support and contact.
00:50:36
Speaker
Yeah, so I think there's a, you know, I wish Kyle were on for this question because Kyle had to counsel Mark and I through a lot of the pandemic work we're doing.
00:50:45
Speaker
But it's funny because every time we start talking about, how did you read this format form, and Kyle would ask us all the time, I remember this Mark, but Kyle would be like, have you guys ever spent an hour on Facebook and felt better about yourselves afterwards? I think that's what we have to ask ourselves. All the social media is doing a great job of keeping us connected in ways that humanity has never been able to. But at the same time, it's also been able to draw some negatives that we've never been able to see.
00:51:14
Speaker
You know, even the thing like the, uh, the addiction of the like button, right? Oh man, this post, I posted only got 30 likes and that one got 150 likes. I don't know what I did.
00:51:24
Speaker
Okay, but who cares, right? But at the same time, that's a real thing. And so you can't say who cares because people do. And it's one of those things that we have to acknowledge that it is creating an endorphin run for a lot of people. And it's not just young people, right? There's a lot of like, my parents are in that world, right? Like, I want to see 50 likes in this post. I'm like, mom, you're never going to see that. That's like never going to happen. You have like seven Facebook friends.
00:51:53
Speaker
You know what I mean? But it's that whole thing, right? Everybody wants to have that kind of acknowledgement and positive reinforcement. But we're asking, the problem with social media from my perspective is we're asking that reinforcement people that we kind of know.
00:52:09
Speaker
I would much rather get a text from Mark saying, wow, James, you definitely didn't screw that up today than to see a hundred likes on a Facebook page, right? Because I have a real connection with Mark. No, I'm not discounting the hundred likes. I'll take those too. But I think what happens is a lot of our students and I've got high school kids, my own kids.
00:52:33
Speaker
And, you know, I'm really cautious of how they use social media. I don't restrict them from using it, but I have conversations all the time about how, you know, your life is not reflected on social media. Your life is reflected on how you treat people in the neighborhood, in the classroom, in the school bus. Social media is a place where you go get information.
00:52:53
Speaker
So I'd like to say that I'm bringing them in a healthy way of aspect of that, and they seem well-rounded. Other people have to tell me if that's true or not, because I probably have a little bit of a bias towards my own children. But it's one of those things where they also don't care if they're on it or not, and I think that's healthy. But I also kick them outside for long periods of time and say, go. And then when they're outside for like 20 minutes, they come in and I'm like, you're not enough. Go outside and play basketball or frisbee golf or whatever you're playing.
00:53:21
Speaker
But I think what happens is a lot of our students don't have those environments, and I think we have to reckon with some things in the United States that we do have some students that just don't have great family lives. One of the things we saw in the pandemic right away was how many kids ate for free when the USDA got rid of lunch program costs for the schools. All of a sudden, we watched childhood hunger go down, and now that that program is away, we're watching it creep back up again.
00:53:51
Speaker
And we have to be cognizant of these things. And I think social media is an area where people hide and create a different persona than they really are. And that doesn't bode well for the mental health components. Right.
00:54:06
Speaker
So do you find that in the NFHS and they would deal with a lot of different programs in schools, what seems to be the, are there, is there anything that you see that where there's maybe a better access to mental health services or with numbers of kids that don't show as high of mental health issues that there's something that certain school districts can do to help that?
00:54:33
Speaker
help those numbers out, helping kids be more well adjusted. And is it just about schools having more for them to do, helping them foster more connections at school? Is there something that certain schools do that help their students out more than other schools? I mean, this is me super self-serving my own job, but I'm going to say it anyway, right?
00:54:55
Speaker
the more kids are involved in high school activity programs, the better off they're going to be. When I was a teacher, I was teaching middle school and my principal came up and he had a call to Stephanie, he's like, I want every kid to be involved in a program.
00:55:10
Speaker
And I will, I have a foundation grant and I'm going to pay stipends. You come from, so like we had a crocheting group and we had an ultimate fizzy group and like all these things. He's like every kid and he's like, you find kids that aren't involved in something, ask what they want and then make the thing and I'll pay you a stipend to do it. We watched the other middle school in town had like, by the time those kids went to graduate high school, they were like an 86% graduation rate. This school had a 98% graduation rate.
00:55:36
Speaker
And the only difference between the two schools was he and he made sure every kid had a place to be.
00:55:43
Speaker
Um, if you look at that, I don't really care what activity you do, right? Like my kids run track and play basketball and they're the band and the orchestra and all that kind of stuff. Um, but I'm like, they're busy all the time. They're always in a high school program. And there's, there's something to be said about school based activity programs that really get a kid to feel part of a community, find a place for success and can really be set for what their trajectory in life is going to be.
00:56:09
Speaker
I'd love them to be in all music classes and theater and everything. But if theater's not their thing and basketball is, then be on the basketball team. If football's not their thing, the marching band is, then great, be on the marching band. Be in something. And I think that's something that we really need to drive home to all of our kids now and just say, there is a place for you. There's multiple activities in every school that exists in the United States. Go find one and be a part of that community. That's my soapbox moment. Amen. Yes.
00:56:38
Speaker
All true. I think that's why, generally speaking, on our campus here, the marching band students are so much better off than the general population, both GPA and mental health-wise, because they are a part of a community. And coming from a music conservatory background, I always
00:57:03
Speaker
early in my career, I was very resentful of the social aspects of marching band. I was just focused on performance, performance, performance. Because for me, when I was in my college marching band, it was all about performance. We were high achieving band. I just really loved that aspect of it. And for me, it was not really the social.
00:57:28
Speaker
But when I became a director, I realized most of the students in the marching band, that's their social network. And so I embraced it more in recent years. And we do a lot of stuff with our band that involves social things that I never would have dreamed about doing when I first started out.
00:57:47
Speaker
Well, and like Mark mentioned about the grades, right, if you're in an NFHS state association program somewhere, right, you have minimum grade requirements to be a part of that program. And so those programs help you stay engaged in school. You know, I joke all the time, like no one goes to school for math.
00:58:05
Speaker
but they're gonna go to school to be in the orchestra or the art program or whatever they're doing. So these programs, yeah, they get kids to school and then they learn math as a byproduct, right? But they get there and they have manual graduation requirements. They have to get to stay involved. And that's a huge thing. I think we need to celebrate that. Well said, well said. So real quick, before we end the show here, Mark, we talked about, you mentioned before briefly about marchinghealth.com.
Physical Training and Educational Resources
00:58:33
Speaker
So what is that about?
00:58:35
Speaker
Well, it's really a physical training and coming from a doctor of physical therapy background, you know, body movement, you know, stamina, endurance, just building up, you know, your respiratory system to be able to, you know, keep your heart rate up for a period of time. So we do dynamic stretching. He's big on dynamic stretching. So not as opposed to static stretching, you know, the old
00:59:06
Speaker
You know, bend your wrist back and feel the stretch. This is more like movement-based kind of stretching. And then, you know, some aerobic activity, different versions of that. And it's just really a warm-up before every rehearsal. But the other byproduct, I think, is it gets
00:59:27
Speaker
It gets the students thinking about, well, I can take this a little farther on my own. I feel better now in December than I did in August. Maybe I should continue doing this. So without me overtly saying it to them, hopefully it'll trigger something in their head and say, hey, I'm going to continue doing this. I'm going to keep exercising even after marching season is over. But yeah.
00:59:54
Speaker
It's really good stuff and it's also injury preventative as well. If you're in better physical condition, you're less likely to be injured by whatever it might be, repetitive injuries and or other things that may happen. Excellent.
01:00:13
Speaker
Yeah. So is there anything for NFHS that's coming up, any events that the public we're interested in can go and learn about more? Or is there anything coming up like a big conference or any sort of learning modules and things? You mentioned the website or the system NFHS Learn, right?
01:00:35
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, uh, we have, we always have something going on, but I mean, the best thing for people to do is, uh, go to NFHSlearn.com and go take some free courses and learn some good stuff. And then, you know, go volunteer at your local high school as a assistant coach or something and get involved and get kids involved. And I guarantee you won't regret it. You know, become a music adjudicator, you know, basketball ref and anything of those, right? Everyone needs officials. So go do that too. Plus you get paid for it. So.
01:01:05
Speaker
Make it the big bucks. $85 a game. Right.
Conclusion and Guest Acknowledgements
01:01:09
Speaker
So, Mark, you got a whole bunch of planning to do for the Orange Bowl, correct? Yeah. As we sit here on December 8th, we just got our official bid last Sunday, December 4th. So, I've already been to Miami on a quick hit or a visit. We're putting the final pieces to our itinerary together right now.
01:01:30
Speaker
of our students are responding to our emails and surveys that we put out. It's complicated, but we have a system in place. But it's very procedural. But by Monday, we'll have the itinerary out. Everybody will know what's happening. And then we'll just meet up down in Florida. There's worse places to be, that's for sure.
01:01:57
Speaker
Yeah, for darn sure. So James, Mark, thank you so much for your time and your expertise. We can go out for hours, but all this information is so much to cover, but I really appreciate your time being here today. And best of luck. Thank you, Steve. Thank you. Yeah, thanks. And that's it for our show today. I want to thank Dr. James and Dr. Mark for being on the show today, but also for their wonderful research. If you want to read more about their research and find the studies, you can find the link in our description for the show. If you like what you heard today, please feel free to leave a review.
01:02:27
Speaker
For Yossi Ansari, this is Stephen Karaginas and this has been the athletes and the arts podcast