California Music Educators Association (CMEA), Central Coast Section, is a professional organization comprised of music teachers from all levels of education. Its membership comes from Monterey, Santa Cruz, San Benito, and San Luis Obispo Counties. If you wish to contact us via e-mail, please select one of our board members.
Dear Friends,
I am happy to take this opportunity to introduce myself as the new President of the CMEA CCS. I have served on the board since 2017, but took a gap year during the 2021-2022 school year for personal family reasons. I am happy to be back and fully energized for the next school year.
Short summary about myself, I began teaching at Alisal High School 2015-2016 school year. I teach beginning/intermediate band, advanced band, choir and guitar. In 2017, I joined the board as a member at large and from 2018 to 2020 I chaired the high school honor band event. My goals for the next two years are to bring everything back to normalcy to the best of my ability and to outreach as many music directors within our section to have their school participate and have a voice within the section.
For the last two years, it has not been easy, but as we are getting closer to being back to normal. We hope to have every event happening this coming year. Last school year, we were able to hold all of the honor events, but did not have any of the festival events. Hopefully, this year we will have everything back on track. We want all of our students to have as many opportunities to enjoy and explore the world of music. We want to build lasting memories for them and hopefully inspire future musicians to keep the arts alive. We want to enrich their depth of knowledge in order to grow, fulfill their needs and expose them to a plethora of repertoire to expose their experience to various literatures, techniques and interpretations.
Behind the scenes it takes a lot of work to have a successful event. Thank you to all the current and new board members for taking on this challenge, but as a board we are always looking for more volunteers. We are always in need of articles for the Sonata, or help assisting honor or festival events. If you are interested in volunteering or even joining the board, please feel free to contact me at samuel.oh@salinasuhsd.org. If you are interested in joining the board, we will be holding our board retreat sometime in August. Time, place and date are still to be determined.
As we are getting back to normalcy, we would like to have all music directors come together for our annual Fall General Meeting and Banquet. It is a great opportunity to know what is happening statewide with music education and what is planned for the school year within our section. As for the banquet, it will be great to see everyone face-to-face again. We should take this opportunity to reset and meet current and new music educators within our section. Time, place and date are still to be determined, but we highly encourage everyone to make an effort to come together and build relationships that will benefit us educationally and socially. We hope to see you there.
Samuel Oh