Sarah Nowlin
Band Director

Band director Sarah Nowlin has been invited three times to play at international clarinet symposiums. She plays five to 10 times a year with the Dayton Philharmonic Orchestra and travels around the country four to five times a year with a clarinet quartet. For the past several summers, she has taught clarinet and music at the Interlochen Center for the Arts summer band camp in Michigan. Yet as an elementary school student in Yakima, Wash., she was not invited into the Talented and Gifted Program. “I often would like to go back to that teacher, to that program coordinator, and say you can’t eliminate kids,” she says. “It’s just not right.”

Teaching both band and pottery, Ms. Nowlin says the arts make students better-rounded and offer broader life lessons – like trying new things, working hard to practice them and not giving up. She laughs at the memory of students who throw clay on a pottery wheel for the first time. “It’s fun to watch them. I tell them it’s probably going to take you 30 minutes and they just don’t understand. Then I say, ‘How can one pound of clay be stronger than you?’ ”

There’s probably a life lesson in that example about staying centered, but Ms. Nowlin’s take-away is that learning a new skill takes hard work. “Some people have a talent and you can recognize that spark,” she says. “But maybe some kids have a spark, and that happens later.”

Ms. Nowlin claims she was a horrible clarinet player when she first tried it, but she practiced for years and got help from a teacher who became her champion. Now, she can play every wind and percussion instrument in the band. Not every band director can do that. “The students obviously gain a lot from having that instrument played for them.”

She wants to combine band and pottery by teaching kids to make clay wind instruments. An experiment with sixth graders on bells and whistles for a science lesson on sound was moderately successful, so she has hopes she could learn how to make an ancient instrument called a rakkett. “It's called rakkett for a reason,” she warns. “They’re pretty obnoxious but they have the coolest sound.”