Bloomington-Normal, Illinois, is an active college community fueled by Illinois State University (ISU) and offers much in the way of culture. But just 35 minutes away are smaller Midwest towns struggling for access to the arts. For Red Cross branch manager Carolyn Wetzel, an amateur violinist who lives in Fairbury—a rural town with a population of about 4,000—simply finding a nearby cello teacher for her nine-year-old son, Quentin, was a challenge.

“We’re out in the boonies,” Wetzel concedes.

When the only string teacher in Fairbury moved away, Quentin was effectively cut off from string education, marooned along with his dreams of playing the cello. Then came an announcement that excited the Wetzels: the Illinois State University String Project was extending to a satellite location in Chenoa, close to their home.

The ISU String Project, now in its seventh year, offers low-cost violin, viola, cello, and bass lessons to children in the third and fourth grades. Supervised by university faculty, undergraduate music-education majors (or student teachers) give group and private lessons to children. Through this the student teachers learn what it’s like in a real classroom setting and build strategies for when they enter the field after graduation.

To Bloomington-Normal children, the project serves as a supplement to music instruction they’ll receive beginning in the fifth grade. To Quentin and others in the satellite project, it’s much more; their school district doesn’t offer a stringed-instrument program. “It helped [Quentin] realize that he’s not an oddball for playing a stringed instrument,” Wetzel says. “Out here, very few kids play, and the ones that do can feel like lone rangers. This gave him a peer group, and it really motivated him.”

The ISU String Project is one of 32 independent sites in the National String Project Consortium (NSPC). Founded in 1999 by the American String Teachers Association and then-president Robert Jesselson, the NSPC’s mission is to train and deploy highly motivated teachers to address what ASTA says is a shortage of qualified string teachers in public and private schools, and to boost the number of children who play stringed instruments.

A decade on, the NSPC has raised $2.7 million from a number of sources, including String Letter Publishing, to support the projects and fund new sites. Its ambitious goals of graduating dedicated teachers and attracting children to string lessons have been met with relative success.

Community Support Is the Key

The earliest string project can be traced back to 1948 at the University of Texas, but many of the NSPC projects are modeled after the University of South Carolina–Columbia (USC) String Project, which Jesselson modified in the early ’80s to include undergraduates, among other things.

As is the case with many of the newer sites, the USC String Project was the only model of string education offered to elementary-school students in South Carolina when Jesselson adopted it in 1981. Under Jesselson’s leadership, the project began reaching out to Columbia’s immediate and surrounding communities by giving performances and demonstrations. In return, the community embraced the project. Local school districts took note. Today, Jesselson reports that there are five school districts offering string education in the area, thanks mainly to the efforts of parents.

“We were pumping out all of these teachers, and a large number of kids were coming down to the university and the parents would say, ‘We should be able to have this in our own school districts,’ ” Jesselson says. “It was the parents. The string project itself didn’t do anything to make it happen, but it was simply a good thing that evolved.”

The hope was that other string projects would create the same kind of community support, and for the most part they have. As of the latest NSPC survey, nine additional sites have reported school districts beginning to offer string lessons. At its start, the NSPC recorded 500 students enrolled in the projects. Today, the NSPC reaches out to 2,357 students in 23 states.

Under the directorship of Adriana La Rosa Ransom, the ISU String Project in the past three years more than doubled its enrollment to 115 children. “It’s nice to be able to offer something like that to the area, and the parents are really happy with that opportunity,” says Ransom, who also sits on the NSPC board of directors.

Shop owners are also recognizing the benefit of having a string project in town. At Carl’s Professional Band Instrument Repair in Bloomington, kids involved in the string project account for 10 to 15 percent of their rentals. “Most of these kids are beginners, so rentals are the best way to start out,” says Travis Thacker, who works alongside his father, Carl, at the shop. “When they’re done renting, they’ll usually end up with a nice instrument.”

Joy Hippensteele, at the Music Shoppe in Normal, hasn’t counted the number of heads that come in from the projects, but she still speaks for the value of having one around. “It’s just sowing the seeds of string playing to that much greater of an audience,” Hippensteele says. “That’s the greatest benefit that we would see.”

This kind of community support is crucial. Its absence can mean the undoing of a string project, as the Ball State University (BSU) String Project in Muncie, Indiana, learned. After enrollment of student teachers and children spiraled downward, the project ended operations this year.

Former project director Kristin Turner points to a number of causes that led to the ultimate downfall: lack of facilities, inadequate funding, and clashing schedules. But what hurt Turner’s project the most was getting the cold shoulder from band teachers and principals when looking for new students. “Everybody keeps saying, ‘Indiana is a marching state,’” Turner says.

There is light at the end of the tunnel, though. Turner says the BSU School of Music may host a community music school and a youth orchestra. “The string project was really good while it was going well,” Turner says. “I have a number of students who are out there now who have made wonderful adjustments in public-school teaching.”

Teaching Lab Curbs Turnovers

Studies have shown that teaching labs produce effective string teachers who are more apt to stay in the field. Professors Richard Ingersoll, of the Penn Graduate School of Education, and Thomas M. Smith, of Vanderbilt Peabody College, analyzed the results of the National Center for Education Statistics’ Schools and Staffing Survey along with its Teacher Follow-Up questionnaire supplement. In their report, Do Teacher Induction and Mentoring Matter?, Ingersoll and Smith examined a sample of education majors and found that 16 percent did not receive any induction or mentoring. This group’s predicted probability of turnover after the first year in the field was 40 percent.

In Lubbock, Texas, the string project at Texas Tech University reports a lower percentage of turnovers among its alumni. Since its founding in 2001, the project has graduated 35 string education majors. Of these, 34 are still teaching.

“When these [student teachers], who taught anywhere from one to four years in the program began their careers, their supervisors couldn’t believe they were that far along,” says Texas Tech String Project director Bruce Wood, who also sits on the NSPC board of directors. “In terms of walking into a classroom of children learning to play stringed instruments, they felt right at home.”

And the number of student teachers enrolled in the NSPC keeps climbing—from 43 to 321 this year. Many of the string projects have passed, or are well on their way to passing, the quota of ten student teachers required by the NSPC in a six-year plan.

Momentum seems to be in favor of the NSPC, but the economy is a roadblock. “What we need to try to figure out is how to get more schools to buy into the whole idea,” says Jesselson, who was applying for grants when he was interviewed for this article. “Right now, it’s wrapped up in the whole financial situation.

“I’m getting calls from people who want to start a program, but can’t find the funding to match the grants, and the universities just don’t have any wriggle room to do anything new.”

A Personal Benefit

Back in Fairbury, Illinois, Wetzel and other parents are planning to approach their school district with a proposal for a string program. If the district doesn’t have the money for it, they’ll look into grants and local business support.

“We think that we have a critical mass,” Wetzel says. “If we have a pretty good crop sign up for the string project and their children continue after the first year, then I hope we can make a compelling case to the district.”

For Wetzel, Quentin’s string education means more than the gratification of hard work and diligence, cultivating social skills by playing with others, and excelling academically. When she and her son work on duos together, its importance becomes clear to her. “It gives me a way to connect with my child,” she says.