UPDATE: School Officials to Meet With Brick Memorial Band, Parents

UPDATE: Brick Schools Superintendent Walter Uszenski on Thursday afternoon said reports that the Brick Memorial High School Marching Band would be asked to practice on the school’s baseball field or an inclined macadam surface next to the football field are erroneous.

An article on the Brick Shorebeat site Wednesday night quoted Mayor John Ducey as saying the baseball field was to be one of the practice sites.

“When we had these discussions last year, we walked around the school looking at sites, and we were told then that the baseball field had no lights, so we took it out of consideration,” Uszenski said.

And the macadam area Uszenski was referring to Wednesday afternoon in a phone call with the Patch was the student parking lot the band has long used for its rehearsals, he said, not one right next to the football field. “I referred to it incorrectly,” he said.

Uszenski said school officials would be meeting with the band parents tonight to go over the situation and resolve everyone’s concerns.

“Nothing was supposed to change from the agreement we had last year,” he said. ”We didn’t change anything now. We are using the same sites we did then.”

PREVIOUSLY:

In a parking lot, in the fading twilight, they practiced. A crossover step, right foot over left, left foot step, 10 drummers trying to find unity. Not drumming. Just marching.

“Three of them were out last week with the flu,” said Anna, who refers to herself as “Mom Anna.” “They have some catching up to do.”

Down the hill on the football field, the sound of trumpets and flutes floated up, backed by the steady beep of a metronome keeping time, as the rest of the band and its color guard worked on a piece of choreography.

In the parking lot next to the field, parents gathered in clusters, voicing their displeasure over the events of the day.

Walter Uszenski, superintendent of the Brick Township School District, said Wednesday afternoon in a phone call that the Brick Memorial Marching Band would be holding its practices at various sites at the high school in an attempt to alleviate noise complaints from residents of Alexander Avenue, whose homes back up to the high school’s property.

“This is ridiculous,” said Shannon Christensen, one of the members of the board of the marching band’s parent organization, said Wednesday evening. “They didn’t even come talk to us.”

And she and other parents are not ready to let the issue go, vowing to bring their complaints to the Board of Education meeting on Sept. 18 at Brick High School.

They also are staging a rally tonight at 7:30 in front of the high school.

A report on the Brick ShoreBeat website quoted Mayor John Ducey as saying the marching band would use the school’s baseball field as one of its practice sites.

“They’re asking these kids to march on this?” Christensen said, pointing to the parking area next to the football field. The blacktopped lot sits on an incline and slopes from the back of the home football grandstands toward the woods separating the neighborhood from the school property. It’s about a 5- to 10-degree slope, when you stand at the bottom of the hill.

The color guard performs acrobatics as part of its routine, which become risky on an uneven surface, she said.

The baseball field, Christensen said, “is full of holes and has a pitcher’s mound. There’s no lights on that field. Sometimes the kids are marching backwards.”

“Someone’s going to get hurt,” she said.

The band has won numerous awards over the years, so many that four trophy cases built a few years ago and donated to the school can’t hold them all. Banners hang from the ceiling in the band room, and current trophies and plaques -- including national championship awards from 2013 -- stand on a table and line the chalkboard trays around the room.

“It’s not about winning,” said one father. “They are taught excellence.” It’s an excellence that spills over to the classroom, he said, as the valedictorian and salutatorian of Brick Memorial’s Class of 2014 were both in the band. “They’re now rooming together at Stevens,” he said, referring to Stevens Institute of Technology in Jersey City Hoboken, which is known for its rigorous science and engineering programs.

“There is no second-string here,” he said. “If you’re in the band, you are part of the performance. If you’re not there, there’s a hole.”

Residents of Alexander Avenue told NBC News4 on Wednesday night that the noise from rehearsals keeps their children awake.

Phyllis Matseur, who lives on Jessica Lane where it crosses Alexander closest to the football field, walked over to Wednesday evening’s practice to show her support and expressed irritation that neighbors are complaining about the band.

“I’ve lived here for 30 years. I love the sound of the band playing,” she said, adding that some of the neighbors claims are farfetched. “There’s only a couple of families with younger children in the neighborhood. One couple has their kids with them, but the kids are 20 and 25.”

The parking lot where the band was rehearsing Tuesday night, before a neighbor’s complaint caused police to come out and shut it down, faces the back of the school, not the side. Red lines -- visible on a Google Maps image of the high school -- match the yardlines on a football field and are parallel to the lines dividing individual parking spaces. The “sidelines” of the practice grid parallel the longer lines marking the parking spaces.

“The band faces away from the woods (a line of trees between the school and the homes on Alexander Avenue) when they practice,” another mother said. “They have trouble seeing the drum majors because the sun goes down right behind them.

“I don’t understand how they (the residents) say it reverberates,” she said.

Christensen said the band had a rough summer to begin with. Its two-week band camp was shortened because the band was locked out of the school on Fridays. Larger instruments, including xylophones and bass drums, are stored in the band room, Anna said. “So we lost two eight-hour practice days,” Christensen said. Then the band was forced to not practice two other nights because of noise complaints, before the issue exploded Tuesday night.

“They’ve already lost valuable practice time,” she said, “and now this. It’s just ridiculous.”

“What are these people going to do when we host our band competition?” Christensen asked, noting the event, which is coming up Sept. 20, is the band’s biggest fundraiser -- a critical event because the band has been invited to march at Walt Disney World in Festival Disney in April. “What about all the noise from the football games? You have the away band, our band, the cheering, the loudspeakers. Are they going to complain about that too?”

“These kids just want to practice,” she said. “They’re good kids. They’re here, and not getting in trouble like some of the kids the police have to come here to chase out of the woods.”

(PHOTO: Brick Memorial High School Marching Band drummers practice steps for a routine Wednesday night at the high school, following lines on a parking lot the band has used for a dozen years. The parking lot is at the back of the school, which is to the right of the drummers. Alexander Avenue, where residents have complained about the noise from the drums in particular, is to the drummers’ backs. Credit: Karen Wall)