wisconsin music educators association president
from the survey results is distributed to the committees to read. The big day for the planning session is typically held on the first Saturday in January. This year’s planning session day will be January 6, 2018. Please mark your calendars now and plan on attending. We also offer the ability to attend the meeting virtually by means of your electronic device.
When the planning session day arrives much work has already been done in preparation. The committee chairs, who are usually WMEA Council members each representing a particular area, have received the proposals online in order to look over their area’s offerings. If an area does not have a large number of offerings or is lacking in a topic area where a need is seen, then the chair will be responsible, with their committee, for creating and writing session proposals on planning day. When the day arrives, the chairs are given an orientation for the day’s happen- ings and the ground rules for the selection of proposals. In the various committees, members who attend see the offerings, are allowed to give verbal input about each individual proposal, but are not allowed to “apply pressure” to get a session chosen. There are two rounds during the morning, with round 1 being Band, Choir, Orches- tra, Early Childhood, Elementary General Music and Secondary General Music. Round 2 is Curriculum and Assessment, Lifelong Learning, Higher Ed/Research, Mentoring, Licensing and Professional Development, NAfME Collegiate, Jazz, Advocacy and Public Relations, Tech- nology, CMP, Composition and Impro- visation, and our newest area, Diversity, Inclusion, Equity and Access. Some areas, particularly band, get a very large turnout and some areas get fewer participants. Each area votes and prioritizes their pro- posals by the end of their rounds, and all the paperwork is turned in to the WMEA staff member in charge.
After each area has session proposal selections prioritized then the process to invite presenters is next. The WMEA staff member in charge takes care of this, while also letting presenters know if they did not get their session chosen. The WMEA
Wisconsin School Musician
staff members who deal with exhibitors and music businesses, along with Ex- ecutive Director Tim Schaid, choose the industry sessions that will be presented at conference.
The next big step is the scheduling day. Large grids of times and rooms available on Thursday and Friday of the conference are created. Each session and perfor- mance that’s offered is assigned a session number and each presenter is given a presenter number in order to be tracked or looked up in a computer program. The sessions and performances are printed out on labels and placed on color-coded sticky notes. The conference chair and staff member in charge of scheduling spend the day finding as close to the best day and time to schedule each offering. Many presenters can only be on one day (in particular, the honors conductors and staff members) and some presenters have more than one session and need careful consideration. Performances need warmup time and special spaces. Drum and other instrumental sessions need to be placed further away from other sessions in order to avoid noisebleed. Effort is made to keep Thursday and Friday as balanced as possible. When attendees comment that there were two or more sessions that were offered at the same time, please know that every effort was made to avoid potential conflicts, but sometimes there are so many great sessions that it is impossible to keep them all separated. This is a great problem to have in my estimation. Quite often it is possible to find the materials for the session you missed on the Event Mobi app after the conference is over. These materials can be quite useful, if you had to miss the session.
When the conference schedule is finalized, print publications can be completed and Event Mobi also gets the information that you see when using the app. The AV equip- ment each room and presenter requires is contracted with Monona Terrace and the Hilton, which we use for the additional rooms that are needed for the conference. Music stands, choral risers and percussion equipment are also borrowed from several area high schools. Volunteer staff, WSMA
“It is all a finely tuned operation with much oversight by various WMEA staff members.”
field representatives and area high school music department students are given as- signments. The students can be spotted by their bright orange stage crew shirts and do much “schlepp” work during the conference. The exhibitors have “load-in” time to get their exhibits set up and look- ing great for your arrival on Thursday morning. It is all a finely tuned operation with much oversight by various WMEA staff members.
The conference happens with an enormous amount of behind the scenes work, plan- ning, heavy lifting and volunteers. When a WMEA member asks what they can do to be more active in WMEA, the quick answer is: Attend the planning session day in January and preside at conference sessions. Presiders are responsible for keeping sessions on time and running smoothly and also give feedback in the presider survey which lets the conference planners know how the session went. Please consider doing one or both of these in the future.
One final note in the way of vocabulary, I have used the word “conference” over 20 times in this article. The word was used very purposely. The word “conference” replaced the word “convention” several years ago to reflect the professional de- velopment that was provided as opposed to the social aspect that the word “con- vention” implies. There is much being offered to help you out with providing a Well-Rounded With Music education. WMEA is very proud of the conference offerings and hopes that you will be able to attend in October!
Lynn Seidl is the current WMEA president. Email:
lynn.a.seidl@
gmail.com
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