Superintendent’s Spotlight: Warwick Valley Middle School Guitar Club

This week’s WVCSD Superintendent’s Spotlight highlighted the members of the middle school’s Guitar Club. Warwick Valley Middle School students Isabella (Bella) Hernandez, Stella Muehlbauer and Holden Tracy are the club’s three members. The club has been around for 30 years and running, originally launched in 1993 by Warwick Valley Middle School English teacher Darryl Wilbur. After Mr. Wilbur ran the club and grew its membership for many years, advising of the club was eventually taken over by science teacher Ed Mesic. The club is currently under the advisement of special education teacher Brett Algera.

“Darryl, my father-in-law, started the club many years ago, and it was just a couple of kids with guitars, learning some songs,” said Mesic. “He asked the principal at the time if they could play a small concert for the school – a little tiny thing in the library – and it has evolved over the years to be the big thing we have now.”

Tracy is a four-year Guitar Club veteran and one of its drummers. He has been playing music ever since he was young. He started off with piano and added percussion in fourth grade, when he started playing along to tracks on his dad’s drum set.

Hernandez, also a four-year veteran, joined the chorus right away when she started middle school and sings leads and harmonies in the club.

Muehlbauer, who has a music teacher for a dad, has grown up around music. She is also a WVMS Drama Club performer and got into Guitar Club three years ago.

Guitar Club encourages students to be responsible, respectful collaborators. Once bands are formed from the pool of Guitar Club members and music is assigned, band members are expected to be responsible for learning their parts. Not only does that expectation help with the quality of concert performances, it helps students understand the importance of being a supportive team player — collaborator — who is respectful of other’s time and efforts.

“The advisors expect us to work on our songs outside of the club and then bring back what we learned when we have practice,” Tracy said. “So that teaches us to be dependent on ourselves, and to make sure you put in the work to get the best results for the band. Then, when you’re performing together, it just shows how all of you guys can come together and just make it sound really good!”

“I think Guitar Club definitely teaches you to be responsible,” added Muehlbauer, “because you have to know what you’re doing and learn before your rehearsal.”

Mesic enjoys seeing those moments of band synergy happen when the students come to Guitar Club having “done their homework.” He and Algera have fun playing along with the students, helping them pick out their individual parts by ear, but both say that the real joy comes when they finally slowly roll off their own volumes until the students are playing on their own.

“I used to liken it to taking the training wheels off,” said Mesic. “It’s so much fun playing with them on a song when their rehearsing, and then to just casually, step back and watch them take off!”

Algera said that being the advisor for Guitar Club has been a lot of fun for him, and something that he never had the chance to do as a student. “To this day, I can’t believe that we get to do this — the club, the assembly where everybody gets out of class to come down and listen to their peers play,” he said. “I’d never heard of anything like that; it’s certainly not an opportunity I had when I was in school. It’s incredible that here in Warwick, the club not only exists, but that it gets so much support from other students, the administration and other faculty, parents!”

In Algera’s first year as advisor, the club nearly sold out the high school auditorium for their annual February concert. This year, the annual concert was once again back to near capacity.

The Warwick Valley Middle School Guitar Club continues to welcome and encourage creators, collaborators, and communicators. And learning how to be in a band really is a lifelong skill that demands a mindset of lifelong learning!