Highland Orchestra able to complete year thanks to donations
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POCATELLO — Sharlie Raymond Winder was still in bed at 6:20 a.m. like she normally would be, but this morning she was already awake.
“I just had a feeling that something was off,” Winder said.
Winder laid in bed on the morning of April 21, waiting to realize why something felt off. She soon got a phone call from the school district, telling her that there wouldn’t be classes today.
Winder, the orchestra teacher at Highland High School, had gotten the same information that all the other parents had gotten. Her daughter is a Highland student and one of her students in orchestra.
She wasn’t sure why they’d cancelled classes, but then she got a text from a friend. Winder’s friend had sent her a news article, and that’s when she found out what was happening.
Her orchestra classroom had gone up in flames, along with most of Highland’s D wing.
A class in shock
On the morning of April 21, Beca Gneiting, a Highland orchestra student, got out of bed like it was any morning, but her mom gave her the news that school was cancelled, and the authorities were at Highland High School.
“What’s going on?” she wondered.
Gneiting’s mother searched on Facebook, and then told her, “oh my goodness, your school burned down.”
“That’s not something you wake up expecting to hear,” Gneiting said.
Alanna Lyman, another Highland orchestra student, said that after she heard about the fire, “it took a while to sink in.”
“But then after everything sunk in, I could not stop crying. I was in tears,” Lyman said.
Lyman considered the orchestra room her safe classroom, and she had left her violin there.
“People that don’t play an instrument don’t understand how attached you can get,” said Kennedi Winder, Sharlie’s daughter.
Kennedi found out that about the fire from her mother that morning, that basically the whole music department was gone, and she was in shock.
It didn’t sink in until later that day when she went over to a friend and fellow orchestra classmate’s house. They talked about it and Kennedi saw pictures of the damage.
“That’s when it just hit me that it wasn’t there anymore,” Kennedi said.
A home up in flames
The Highland High Fire started at about 4 a.m. due to an electrical failure on the stage in the cafeteria. The orchestra room was right next to the stage.
Gneiting friend sent her a picture that gave an aerial view of the damage to the school.
“The roof was entirely gone. It sunk in and I could see the top of the orchestra room and the hallway that we would walk to get to the room,” Gneiting said. “Our closet where we keep our instruments is on the stage and you could tell that everything was destroyed.”
“My violin wasn’t that great, but it was my first full-size violin and it was just really sad to me because I don’t have it anymore,” Kennedi said.
“Our instruments become a part of us. My students have very personal instruments that belong to them, and I could line up all my kids and all of their instruments and know exactly which instrument belongs to that kid,” Winder said. “It’s almost an extension of them.”
As Winder laid awake in bed having read the news, she looked at the pictures of the school burning, and she could see the door that she used to walk in everyday.
“That doorway is no longer there, and it’s hard to see your home up in flames like that,” Winder said.
Winder began messaging her students that morning to check on them and could tell that most of them were in shock. She started thinking about how they were going to finish the rest of the year.
She thought that they would at least have time to get ready and perform their end of the year concert, “But there’s no way we’ll make it the festival, just no way.”
But that was before the phonecalls started rolling in.
Love and community
Winder didn’t think it was possible for them to make to festival after losing so many of their orchestra’s instruments, but that very day people began calling her to offer support.
“Phone call after phone call came, and I had other high schools from outside of our district telling us that they would get instruments to us … and that they would make sure that this happened for our kids,” Winder said. “And that kind of took me out of the shock into, ‘I’ve gotta get to work and I want to make this happen for my kids.'”
Now, all of the students have something to play through the rest of the year.
Alameda Middle School has an orchestra room, and it turned out that its prep time was during Highland orchestra’s class time, “and the district worked so well with us to let us move our class there,” Winder said.
“The community has been super supporting … the amount of donations we’ve received is incredible,” Gneiting said. “We’re all super thankful and it’s just really awesome.”
Lyman spoke to her excitement that she felt when she found out they would still get to do their planned performances.
“I was like, ‘Yes, we get to go to this concert that we’ve been practicing for and we get to still be able to play,'” Lyman said.
“It was a relief that we could still meet together and be a part of this musical community that we (are) in,” Kennedi said.
Winder said she feels, “an overwhelming feeling of gratitude to everyone who has helped us get here, and gratitude to the students and their parents for being willing to get them to our rehearsals, because I know that’s a big challenge and a huge sacrifice for them.”
When Winder and her students walked into Alameda’s orchestra classroom for the first time, they found that the teacher and students had taken time to decorate it in Highland’s colors with streamers and posters to welcome them.
Winder said it gave them, “an overwhelming feeling of love and community.”
People who want to help the orchestra replace their personal instruments can look at this Facebook group where people are coordinating those efforts.
For people who want to purchase a replacement for a student’s instrument, they can order them on the Snake River Strings website and use the code HHSMUSIC and select pick up instead of shipping to get 10% off. The Facebook group should have an updated list of instrument needs.
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