Starting next school year, for the first time ever, middle school students can audition for the Fine Arts Academy as a color guard major. Although the major will be a smaller portion of the academy with a cap of five to seven new students, Fine Arts Academy Director Samuel Parrott said the decision to add color guard as a major came from wanting to reinforce the growth the program has already been experiencing on its own in recent years.
“We want to invest time and space into [it], and we want to make sure that the color guard program continues to grow and flourish,” Parrott said. “It’s been doing so well over the last few years, and we just want to make sure it keeps going that way.”
Parrott explained that the push to add color guard to McCallum’s fine arts program actually came from middle school students and parents from Kealing and Lamar middle schools. McCallum, Lamar and Kealing have collaborated between color guard programs with McCallum color guard director Wilbert Toruno visiting Lamar and Kealing’s color guard class several times a week to help them with choreography and teaching.
“It actually came from kids outside of the school who said they wanted to come to McCallum because they wanted that opportunity, and they specifically wanted to do color guard,” Parrott said. “We also had some students on campus saying that they want to be part of the academy, and they want to be held to that standard and just don’t have the opportunities with the programs that are currently in existence.”
Although color guard can often be grouped with marching band or dance, Parrott emphasized that color guard is a distinct fine art form and therefore should be in its own major category.
“After analyzing the program and seeing the level of artistry that goes into the color guard program, it’s very different from other art forms, so we wanted to make sure that we expanded out to allow students to come to school here for that,” Parrott said.
Toruno said he is excited to establish the color guard program as a separate major at McCallum, especially because it will be one of the first of its kind not only in all of Texas but across the country.
“Even though we’re a factor of the marching band, we’re also our own entity; we like to call it the pageantry arts, and I want to implement that to this community of the arts,” Toruno said. “We’re the first school that offers something like this for color guard in Texas, but actually [also for] the whole United States.”
Toruno said one major problem being solved by adding color guard into the academy would be accessing talented students who live outside of the McCallum attendance zone. Toruno said he is looking forward to growing the color guard program to its full potential.
“I think it will change in a positive way if we look at other schools that have a 60-person color guard, and they all want to go there for that, so we can help build our program by offering spots to students at Kealing and Lamar,” Toruno said. “We lost four people last year who were interested because they were not zoned to McCallum. We have someone who auditioned that’s from Ann Richards, and they want to come to McCallum for color guard, but they’re not zoned, so this is a perfect way for them to come here.”
Senior Audrey Eberly has been in color guard since freshman year. She was first introduced to color guard through dance in middle school.
“My dance teacher in middle school asked me if I wanted to join and then I went to the camp,” Eberly said. “I’ve made a lot of friends and just enjoy doing it a lot. It takes up a lot of my time, but it was definitely worth it.”
Looking towards the future, Toruno hopes to create a friendly and diverse community and give students the opportunity to move forward with color guard even professionally.
“I just want to build a program to be, one, welcoming, but also a place for people who want to grow in the dance or color guard world and hopefully go march professionally,” Toruno said. “Either the Strum Core which is our professional marching band league, or Winter Guard International, which is our winter guard world league, and that we offer for them to become hopefully educators in color guard one day.”
Parrott sees the addition of a color guard major as part of a larger vision to expand the Fine Arts Academy. He emphasized the importance of continuing to grow the academy over the next decades based on students’ new interests. He sees adding color guard as one positive step in the right direction.
“It’s about catering to the students that are expressing that these are their passions,” Parrott said. “Because right now we’re at the 30th year and normally around year 30 is when we should start thinking about, ‘Is it going the way we want it to go, or is it time to modify and meet the needs of the kids?’ They have growing and changing interests so we want to make sure we meet them where they are so we can continue to bring in the best kids to the school.”
