“Hanging on by a thread.”

According to Suttons Bay Public Schools (SBPS) Superintendent Casey Petz, such was the state of the district’s music programs when he stepped into the leadership role at the beginning of 2020. A global pandemic and months of virtual schooling did not help matters. But five years later, Petz says there has been “tremendous progress” toward revitalizing the fine arts at SBPS – to the point where the status quo is moving “from revival to more of a thrive mindset” as the sun sets on the 2024-25 school year.

With just a few weeks left of school, many of the music programs at SBPS are hitting culmination points for the year. Last week, the district announced that its high school band had “achieved a significant milestone, qualifying for the State Band and Orchestra Festival and earning a Division II rating — an ‘Excellent’ distinction — under Michigan’s rigorous adjudication standards.” And this weekend, SBPS will present its spring musical, You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown, with performances scheduled for May 15, 16, and 17, at 7pm in the school’s auditorium.

“I am not a music expert, but I can see the tremendous progress that has occurred in a short period of time,” Petz says of the school’s music programs. “It's been over a decade since we've competed and placed in regional or state competitions, but our band was recognized with Individual and ensemble recognition this year. And just in terms of the ear test, if you come to a performance and hear these kids, it’s night and day compared to what it was just a few years ago.”

Speaking to the Leelanau Ticker at the beginning of the 2022-23 school year, Petz explained how a mix of declining enrollment, key staff retirements and departures, and shifting district priorities had led to a fallow period for the school’s fine arts program.

“If you look back 20-25 years, you find the peak of our programs for drama, choral, musical, performance, arts, and band. Suttons Bay had a fabulous reputation for all of those things,” Petz said at the time. “Then you started to see a little bit less [of arts and performance] each year, because we just couldn't sustain what we were doing.”

Coming aboard as superintendent in February 2020, Petz immediately started having conversations with other district leaders about how SBPS could get back to its former glory in music. COVID-19 put those plans on hold, but Petz kept them on the backburner.

“My feeling was, when you look around a community like ours, you see students and families who are drawn to music, drawn to performance, and drawn to the arts in various forms,” Petz says, citing everything from the nearby Interlochen Center for the Arts to Northport’s summertime “Music in the Park” series. “So that was the first step, just looking at the kids we have and what they’re drawn to. And from there, it just made sense to ask: well, what are we going to do about it?”

The most crucial element of getting things back on track, Petz says, was hiring the right people. To lead the band program, for instance, SBPS brought in Dante Billeci, a jazz-trained musician and educator who graduated from Michigan State University’s music school in 2022. Billeci came aboard with Suttons Bay in August 2023, and Petz credits him with getting the district’s band program to its highest water mark in years.

“Prior to this push, we had class sizes at the high school in the single digits for band, and similar in the middle school,” Petz says. “We had compulsory vocal music in the elementary grades, so things were a little different there. But I’d say that, across the board, the eye test would tell you that our kids weren't terribly excited about what the district was offering.”

Fast-forward to now and Petz says SBPS is “in a much different scenario.” Every single fifth-grade student in the district is involved in band, as are approximately 50 percent of the students at the middle school. “Participation is a little lower at the high school, because it's a number that rises over time. We just we haven't had enough time in the program to build that up,” he says. “But we are now in the double digits at the high school, in terms of students involved in band, and I expect we’ll see that number rise every year.”

On the vocal music side, meanwhile, SBPS still has some ground to make up.

“We had two years of progress with our vocal music teacher; her name was Elizabeth Richards, and she left last summer. This year, we kind of had to piece it together, based on the timing of her departure,” Petz explains. “So, we did not make it to any competitions for the vocal music side, but are very close to hiring Elizabeth’s replacement – who I think, in very short order, will have that same level of success that we're having with the band program.”

None of this has been easy. Petz says it’s hard to attract top-tier music education talent to small, rural school districts, hard to get enough students interested to make it all worthwhile, and hard to find the funds to cover everything from instruments to uniforms to travel for competitions and festivals. When asked why the investment and effort is merited, Petz has a simple answer.

“It changes kids’ lives,” he says. “Their whole trajectory is different when they find that community of people. It’s not just learning a skill. It’s a lifestyle; it's a lifelong passion. I always use this example, because I played soccer when I was in high school: When you play your last game of high school soccer, for about 95 percent of us, that's it. You don't need your cleats anymore, or your socks. But you actually can't say that for singing or performance or instrumentation. Even if it doesn’t turn into a career, it’s something that can go with you and serve you for the rest of your life. And that matters.”

Pictured: The SBPS high school band at State Band and Orchestra Festival.