Since I was 18 years old, I have lived out my dream life as a freelance music educator. When you get to teach & make music all day, the world often feels like it is your oyster. You pick and choose how you spend your days. You say yes and no to the work that is most meaningful to you. There is nothing more satisfying to me than pursuing that emotional high of a great performance. 

But nearly 15 years later, sometimes the oyster still smells a little rotten. Season after season, I get the same kinds of requests from band directors, and I struggle to understand them. I do not know a single freelancer who hasn’t experienced it. Take this recent request from a director who reached out to me:

“I am looking for a visual tech with several years of experience, drum corps and winterguard experience preferred, ideally pursuing or already completed a degree in music education.” 

“Sounds like a great get for your students.” I say to the director. “What’s the pay for a position like this?”

 A long pause. “Well. Pay is conditional on experience” the director awkwardly offered.

“What is an estimate if somebody checks all of these boxes?”

“We don’t have a lot of money, the budget is tight. We can afford up to $300 per month.”

Hold up:

If you were to pay your band staff $300/ month from August through November (a generous assumption, most will not pay out all 4 of these months in full) would equal a grand total of $1200. Does that sound reasonable? Let’s math out how much that is really worth given an extremely conservative schedule.

Typical week at a low-commitment high school:

Tuesday Rehearsal: 3-6pm
Thursday Rehearsal: 3-6pm
Friday Football Game: 6-8pm
Contest Saturday: All day (4 times per year), we’ll call this 4 hours of committed time/ show

So, given a simple schedule of 4 conservative weeks per month:

August: 32 hours
September: (1 show) 36 hours
October: (2 shows) 40 hours
November (1 show, 2 full weeks) 20 hours

Total: 128 hours

So. There is our conservative estimate. 128 hours of “contracted time”. I have never worked with a program that utilizes the staff this little, this is near the absolute limit of conservative expectations at this rate. 

So if you rehearse this little and if you are paid for the full month of November, even though you only work for half of it, your standard wage would come out to…

$9.37 per hour

Maybe you pay a little more than this, but ask for another 3-5 hours every week. Perhaps you don’t pay for the last month in full, cutting down the per-hour wage even more. Maybe you think this is a fair wage (and maybe it is for your part of the world)…  

But let’s look back at the criteria for hiring:

A WGI season costs on average anywhere from $500 to $1500. Drum corps costs $1500-$5000. And college… college can cost just about anything you want it to. 

So what are we asking of our staff? 

We are asking them for more than $10,000 of training and experience, and we are asking them to do that to earn less than 10 dollars an hour? It would take a staff member over a decade to “pay back their investment” at these rates!

Pay. Your. Band. Staff.

This is an epidemic in our community. Directors reach out to me constantly to look for a high quality staff member at about this rate of pay, and I am here to beg you to put an end to it. We are hiring paupers that possess highly technical skills. We demand broad knowledge on effective education techniques. Then we pay passionate educators to do these jobs for less than minimum wage in 23 states.

I can’t find the money

I don’t want to come across as unreasonable or solely self-interested. Obviously I stand to benefit from a call to raise band staff wages. And of course I know that band programs are notoriously underfunded nationwide. And this blog misses nuance: there are some areas where $9.30 might be closer to acceptable than not. But remember: one extra rehearsal per week, and that $9.30 quickly drops to below federal minimum wage. I have done the math on every director quote I’ve received over the last decade: more pay below the federal minimum wage than above it. This has to stop.

There are a many questions you need to ask yourself before saying “we can’t afford to pay our staff more”

1. What do I currently spend on “show design?” What impact does show design have on my student’s experience over paying high-quality staff members?
   
2. How much do I currently spend on “props & costuming” What impact do these elements have on my student’s experience over paying high-quality staff members?
   
3. How many staff members do I have? Is it possible I am hiring a large quantity of staff instead of focusing on increasing the well-being of individual members?
   
4. Have I asked my staff about their pay? Do they consider it fair? Does it help them achieve a fair standard of living? If they could be paid a competitive wage, how would it affect their lives?
   
5. What about other equipment? Am I paying exorbitant amounts on microphones, stages, consultants, or other auxiliary costs?

At the end of the day, the people on your team make a bigger impact on the well-being of your students than the bells and whistles we think make us a competitive band. If someone is doing high quality work for you (designers & coordinators included), they should be paid fairly for their efforts.

If you are not overpaying on a single one of these items, but still struggle to afford staff, then perhaps there is some additional fundraising or donation seeking you can undertake. Or maybe it’s time to lower the total number of people you have on staff. There are plenty of programs in difficult financial positions who are able to support their staff. It is figure-outable with the right mindset and tenacity.

What Happens When You Pay Your Band Staff?

Are you still not convinced that paying your staff more pays dividends over time? Let me tell you what freelancers do when the tides of their bank accounts begin to rise:

A friend of mine (we’ll call him Jay) was a percussion instructor with a band I worked with years ago. Jay was a workaholic but loved percussion more than anything. Jeff set the prices for his own scholastic indoor program and was able to pay himself $15/ hour to be the director, designer, and staff in the winter. But in the fall, Jay’s average salary fell to an abysmal $6.75/ hour at the same program. Ethically criminal for someone of Jay’s caliber.

When Jay presented this data to the director and asked for a raise, they came to an agreement that nearly doubled his fall pay. 

What did Jay do with all of that extra income? Jay went to PASIC, he spent an entire weekend at WGI Percussion Finals, and Jay was able to repair his roughshod car without having to sweat the other bills on his plate. 

Paying Jay more did not only affect Jay’s peace of mind, he spent his extra income on personal development, and so he learned new techniques that improved his quality as an instructor too. He was able to quit one of his other two jobs and focus on expanding his private lesson studio. Freelance educators love what they do, and they will invest in themselves whenever they have the resources to do so. Pay your band staff, and they will invest back in themselves, which makes the increase in salary an even better investment.

Let’s Find Solutions

• Discuss Money Upfront: Young freelancers are usually intimidated by the “money talk.” Directly discuss finances with them before they commit to working for you.
• Hire Hourly: Having trouble funding a full staff for your whole season? Consider hiring someone to be there for certain hours each week at an hourly rate. This is how many industry jobs operate, band shouldn’t be different just because we love it.
• Offer other incentives: This is not in lieu of a fair wage. If you cannot raise a fair wage to a competitive wage, consider offering space for your teachers to offer other programs or lessons. Encourage your students to study with them or join their winter program.
• Change your mindset: Just because your staff loves the work that they do does not mean they should do it for free. You are a band director because you love band. And yes, you are almost certainly underpaid too. But you are responsible for what your staff is paid (usually), so make the choice to support them even if your district does not support you enough.
• Don’t ask for favors: If you need to hire someone to set up your $8,000 sound system, pay them! Nobody would go to Google Headquarters and offer up their leadership seminar for free, we should operate under the same ideals.
• “Hire” Students as Staff: In our interview with Ryan Wood, Ryan discusses his limited resources, and how he utilizes students as his staff members. This allows him to keep within his budget & develop his current students’ leadership abilities. All while refusing to underpay someone to come work with his band just because they love doing it. If you can’t afford staff, there are still ethical solutions.

What Actually Matters to You?

I cannot count the number of band directors I have seen wax poetic about the value of music education. I stand with all of you who feel that way. We are underfunded, under supported and underappreciated. You will not find a program in any school that is quite like band. 

I’ve come to expect some school administrators to not understand the full value of supporting the arts. But I will never understand band directors who do attempt to underpay their staff just “because they can”. If the arts matter, then artists matter too. You are a band director because you love band, but would you be a band director if you were paid below minimum wage for your on-the-clock hours? Yet people choose to pay their band staff less than fair wages.

We discuss this in our video series regularly: Pay your band staff, and not only will your program grow, the entire activity will grow. Imagine a world where more than just a select few can pursue a career as a freelance educator. The wealth of experience and knowledge would propel our activity forward for generations. People who currently work 4 jobs just to live their dream as a guard instructor would finally be supported. And the students they teach will get the most benefit from the whole situation.

Just because you can pay your staff a low wage doesn’t mean that it’s right. Just because it is cheap doesn’t mean it’s a good value. We can do better for arts and educators. A rising tide lifts all boats. Pay your band staff, and they will pay you back more than you could possibly expect.

Need Support?

If you don’t know how to succeed in supporting your staff financially, contact me here. I have years of experience consulting band directors on long term financial sustainability. I will work with you for free to help you take steps towards better supporting your staff.