02.10.04
Caribou youth propel quest for music space
by Rachel Rice of the Bangor Daily News

CARIBOU -- For the love of music, a group of local teens is trying to raise $1.2 million. The Caribou High School seniors and recent graduates say a new music facility needs to be built at the school and they plan to make it happen.

The group formed the Caribou High School Music Building Fund committee to construct a 13,000- square-foot facility to house the school's expanding instrumental and vocal groups.

The main issue for students who participate in the school's music program is a lack of space. Two decades ago, the school's population was approximately 800 students, but only 60 participated in the band and chorus.

Now there are approximately 550 students but the music department has about 45 chorus members, 90 band members and 6 students in the string ensemble. The 1,400-square-foot music space, however, has not changed.

"We need several rooms, but we have one," Brandon Bouchard, fund committee chairman, said Friday from his Bowdoin College dorm room. "It takes seven to ten minutes each day during [band] rehearsals to resituate the chairs and ... we have to climb over cases, stands and each other in the band room."

The high school's band, however, has it the easiest.

The chorus practices in the Caribou Performing Arts Center, unless there's a performance, in which case they practice in the gym lobby. When that happens, the group has to sing over the noise from the lunch room just a few feet down the hall.

The strings group practices in the athletic training room, unless the athletics department needs the space, in which case it ends up competing with the chorus and the lunchroom as it practices in the CPAC entryway.

It's a hair-pulling situation that Bouchard has been thinking about since his freshman year at Caribou High School.

What he didn't know until his junior year was that other music students were thinking about it, too.

"A few friends and I got together one day at lunch and started talking about it. We realized we were all thinking of the same thing," Bouchard said. "It would be great to have a bigger space for the music program to practice in."

After that first conversation, a small group of students banded together to find a way to make their idea a reality. With a lot of brainstorming, conceptualizing, and research, the fund committee last spring sought and received approval from the Caribou School Board for the facility.

School officials have helped out and offered the group support on the project. Caribou Principal David Ouellette said it won't surprise him if his students and former students pull it off.

"As alumni and kids who have been apart of the music program, they certainly know what their talking about," Ouellette said Monday. "I do know one thing: If you don't have a dream or have a goal and you don't start, you'll never get there."

This group, he said, does know what it wants and it is doing all that it can to get there.

The group is just a few weeks into raising the $1.2 million needed to build the 130-foot-by-100-foot facility.

"This was completely student-initiated," Bouchard said. "No one came up to us and said, 'The school would like you to build a building. Can you help?' It was us saying, 'The school needs a music building. We hope you can help us.'"

The group isn't hoping for just monetary contributions--it's hoping the Caribou and Aroostook County communities will help to build the facility.

Bouchard said when the Caribou Performing Arts Center was built at the high school, its cost was estimated at $2.2 million.

"When it was ready to be built, local people came together, and it only cost $880,000," Bouchard said. "It's a testament to our community, showing how much we look out for each other When projects like these arise, we all come together to help. That's what we hope will happen with this."