A specialized curriculum for students interested in focusing on music at Viroqua Middle School will be launched this coming school year.

The Viroqua School Board approved the creation of a School of the Arts (SOTA), which is geared toward providing a more in-depth musical education for up to 20 students in grades six through eight.

Music teachers, Brad Thew, Randy Mastin and guidance counselor Jenny Schneider proposed the SOTA program to the board at its monthly meeting, Monday.

"To keep the core curriculum vibrant and active and flourishing, you have to be able to offer other areas," Thew said. "If you want math to be exciting you have to find some things in the world that aren’t necessarily in a math textbook that relate to kids."

Thew used the analogy of students playing basketball in gym class. Thew said students who show an active interest in basketball will then take that next step of playing the sport at a more competitive, structured level.

"So, what we trying to do is provide a venue in the arts, starting with the music department, with students in the middle school who are excited about music, who look at music not only as a way to perform a piece of music, but also look at it historically, look at it through literature, look at it through all the arts, not just the performing arts, but graphic arts and visual arts; that they can take that whole concept and move it further in their career and really excel at what they do as artists," Thew said.

SOTA will co-exist in the Viroqua Middle School as a school within a school.

Thew said there are no startup costs for the district, since the staff needed is already in-house and practice and performing space and equipment are also available.

The music focus of SOTA will be the study of four areas: a primary instrument; piano/vocal; mastery through recording, performing and composing; and understanding through the written word on music theory, history and genre.

Thew said students in the SOTA program will need to purchase one CD or DVD for the year and any music the student requests that is not already available through the school or free online.

SOTA seeks to recruit 20 students from grades six to eight. It will also try to draw five to seven students from outside the district.

SOTA students will still be required to take the requisite math, science, social studies, English and physical education courses, but can opt out of Spanish, technical education, art, health or resource to accommodate their schedules.

The school board praised the music department for the idea of a SOTA school, but some concerns were raised that staff members may be overloading their schedules.

"I’m trying to figure out where your time is coming from…," board member Sarah Johnson said. "You’re busy, so I’m wondering how does this work out, where you have time for all these lessons and all this mentoring of the students?"

Mastin said the scheduling will work out because the majority of the students in SOTA would be students he and Thew would have in their regular classes, this would just require a reshuffling of their own time.

"The time will be tight, there’s no doubt about that, but if we take those students out of our lesson schedule… that still allows us to pull more students out of our later schedule of the day and add in different students, so the time will work itself out that way," Mastin said.

Mastin later said that he would be more than willing to spend the extra time with motivated students.

"If it runs outside my day, well, then it runs outside my day," Mastin said. "It does anyway…On paper it doesn’t, but that’s what we actually do. We do that frequently, all of us do that."

Board member Robert Nigh said he came into Monday’s meeting with reservations about SOTA, but by the end of the presentation and discussion, made the motion for approval.

"I came here not thinking I was going to support this in a way, but we have a lot of questions and concerns and what I want to add to that simply is, I believe that you will manage through those and understand that my support is for the program and why I make the motion is that people have to make those changes and go ahead make them, make it work for the kids because you will," Nigh said. "It’s not my place as a board member to manage this. My hat is off to you guys for coming forward with this."

In other business, the board approved changing scheduling for a referendum seeking to increase the tax levy from November to April 2010.

District administrator Dr. Robert Knadle said the district is waiting to hear from the state regarding the budget for 2009-2010. The district’s fiscal year begins July 1.

"We’re not the only district in this right now, I and everyone else in the state of Wisconsin, we need to have the hard data from the state, the budget bill," Knadle said. "We feel pretty confident that it’ll be a 3.5 percent reduction. We feel that, but we’re just not a 100 percent sure, there are some other attachments to this that have gone through the Assembly."

The board also approved a change in date for the next school board meeting from Monday, July 20, to Monday, July 13.