I haven't posted anything here for ages; I've been super-busy.
What's kept me busy over summer is Belmont Music Centre, and I'm only now just starting to feel that the crazy treadmill is slowing down slightly.
So, the initial problem was that the previous manager at BMC left suddenly midway though last year. I wrote about it here back in September.
We survived 'til the end of the year, and finished off with an awesome 50th anniversary concert celebration.
But then in mid-December we had a decision to make.
No one else had stepped forward to take charge of running the Music Centre. No one else wanted to be over-worked and under-paid, doing the boring, behind-the-scenes un-sexy work that is needed to keep things going.
In the end it was either me take over as manager for the 2020 year (with Gugu also doing heaps as the volunteer committee chairperson) or close the Centre down.
Reluctantly, I agreed to do the manager duties. (Coz, yeah, homeschoolers don't do much all day, do they!)
And then the runaway treadmill started.
I didn't get much of a summer holiday; Music Centre took over the life of all of us in the family. Most days I spent several hours on the computer on various Music Centre duties. Amongst other things, over the past two months I sent over 750 Music Centre emails.
Mulan and Miya got involved, too, helping organise student enrolments and class timetables.
The end result is that we have increased student numbers by about 50%, and enrolments have doubled. Music instrument hires have tripled. We are now turning students away because most classes are full and we have no more funding to open any more classes.
We also discovered years of management neglect in pretty much every area. In the past few years almost every volunteer helper had resigned without replacement, meaning we had no other experienced voices around. There was a record-keeping nightmare, with scattered boxes of dated papers as well as gaping holes in more recent activities. When people resigned they left no notes of their duties to guide their replacements. Basically, we had to reinvent the wheel every step of the way.
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For those interested, here's how the funding works:
Belmont Music Centre is a non-profit that is partly funded by the New Zealand Ministry of Education. The MoE has currently allocated to BMC 1190 paid teaching hours per year -- the BMC manager (me) allocates those hours to teachers, and the MoE pays those teachers directly. (The teacher pay rates are set by the MoE, not the Music Centre.)
In addition to this, BMC uses the Belmont Intermediate School classrooms on a Saturday morning, and BIS signs up the BMC manager; I understand BIS is paid directly by the MoE for this.
The BMC manager (me) is also paid by the MoE. MoE has decided that I get 398 paid hours per year, at approximately $30 per hour.
In reality, I have already put in over 400 hours during summer, and I expect there'll be at least another 400 hours throughout the rest of the year.
Anyone want a job that pays less than $15 an hour??!
(Mama used to do this sort of job back in China, when she was HOD of a language teaching university department with several hundred students. According to Mama, what I did on my own was a three-person job. Thanks NZ MoE!!)
For the various other BMC expenses -- accountant, insurance, instrument upkeep, music resources, etc, etc -- we charge the students a small amount. This year we are asking $150 per class per year. Students may also hire instruments at $50 per year.
Everything else is done by volunteers.
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In other words, BMC exists as part of the New Zealand taxpayer-funded education system to give an opportunity to local children to learn music at a level of quality that schools are unable to provide.
It's a really awesome service, and I fully support it.
But also quite clearly, the Music Centre is hugely underfunded. MoE needs to re-think this.
At present, the Music Centre can only continue to run if many volunteers step in and offer their time and knowledge. (And the Music Centre definitely doesn't work if people treat it as a right, with no other obligation to help out.)
Most people at BMC have been great. And some people have been truly awesome! But sadly there is still the small percentage of selfish people, who waste so much time with their back-and-forth thoughtless niggles. Chasing up freeloaders and dealing with those who have an over-inflated sense of their own importance is not fun.
I'm exhausted. I can't keep putting in the time and energy to BMC that I've been doing. My health is suffering and my family needs me (Mulan would be starting secondary school this year, and I need to focus on organising her learning.)
Since most of the work for the teaching year is now done (hopefully!), I plan to continue as BMC manager until December.
But after that I plan to step back and merely be an unpaid volunteer assistant.
We've put the word out that BMC needs a new manager in 2021. Anyone interested should come and volunteer this year, to get to know the system before taking over.
