I have three young children at home and like many of you, we’ve had quite the year of changes and emotions. Lock down with young children is no joke and while we did our best to get through distance learning and being piled on top of each other in our South Minneapolis home, we weren’t sad at all to loosen those reigns this spring.

I felt such relief when the vaccines were available and my older relatives, especially my mother, could jump on board to protect themselves. After losing one parent over a decade ago and far too soon, I felt pretty determined to keep my one remaining parent safe and healthy.

I also have a five year old son with asthma that is heavily brought on by respiratory infections. As many of you have experienced, the summer colds that are running their course right now have been intense and we’ve had several rough nights and a few frantic trips to urgent care. He has managed to dodge getting Covid-19, but we are staying vigilant with masking and distancing for him.

As the director here at SWS Music School, I wanted you to know that I get it. I understand all of your uncertainties and apprehensions surrounding Covid-19, the Delta variant and all of the unknowns that go hand-in-hand with the madness of this last year. Our children cannot be vaccinated yet and we don’t know when they can be, so we are still here, after an EXHAUSTING year, trying to navigate the uncharted waters that lie ahead.

I get it SO much.

I want you to know that we haven’t stopped requiring masks inside our school and we don’t plan to anytime soon. At this point, our students taking lessons are just used to it and our vaccinated teachers are still masking up and happy to do it. Our group piano lessons are in larger studios and our individual lessons can still happen with distance. We still require hand washing, sanitizing and care from all of our clients and appreciate that our clients are so willing to continue doing this.

But what about our youngest community?

Babies and toddlers aren’t wearing masks yet. So how do we navigate moving classes indoors for them? Our ONLINE classes last year were wildly successful, interactive and innovative. Our OUTDOOR classes this summer were a smashing success, making music under a grove of trees alongside singing birds was almost dreamy. We will still offer both options to some extent for the fall, but we also have prepared for you to come indoors here at the music school. We do, after all, live in Minnesota, where it snowed in October last year.

We have a large space with high ceilings and great ventilation. Our class sizes have been cut down significantly. We also have individual rugs for each family that will serve as your own personal space for music making. We know moving around the room is completely developmentally appropriate, but with the uncertainty of this virus still looming, we are going to continue to ask families to do their best to keep their children in their own space to ensure safety for all of our little musicians. There are too many unknowns and we never really know which child in class might be like my kid and suffer greater at a respiratory infection than others. We are all here to protect that one child together.

As a music educator and researcher, I’m growing more worried that because of the social isolation we’ve experienced this past year, our children are perhaps missing out on the greatest window of absorption for their musical development. Research shows that from birth to age 5, a child’s music aptitude is gaining the most strength. What they need more than anything is singing in various tonalities, moving and chanting in different meters and experiencing a musical bath each week of improvised music. So many parents haven’t known what to do this past year- they’ve tried to prioritize and negotiate where it feels best and now here we are, again, trying to decide what is safe and what is not.

I’m asking you to not put your child’s music education on the back burner, even with the pandemic still looming about. If you’re not ready to come inside, please find an outdoor class or an online class and make as much music with them as you can at home. If we don’t have the right options for you, then let us help you find someone that can. I don’t want waning musical development to be another negative side effect of Covid, because there are too many options out there for it not to rise back up to a level of priority among parents.

I am truly looking forward to a day when I don’t have to write emails like this. But until then, you can at least rely on SWS Music School to continue to prioritize everyone’s health and safety.

We hope to see you this fall. Whether online or in person. Feel free to check out our Health Protocols on our website. We will continue to update them as things continue to change.

Sincerely,

Sarah McCaffrey Ritchie

Director, Songs with Sarah Music School

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