NAMM announced at the Winter 2003 show that the fourth annual “Best 100 Communities for Music Education” survey is underway. Note that the American Music Conference (AMC) and its partners have moved up the annual timetable for the survey.

The survey can be completed online at www.amc-music.org, and will remain available through the end of February. Anyone who wishes to take part can enter information about his or her school district, and the survey’s sponsors encourage people to pass the link along to school administrators and independent educators in their communities who may best be able to fill in all the required data.

Following a careful one-on-one audit of the preliminary data, the 2003 “Best 100” list will be released in March, to coincide with the annual observance of “Music In Our Schools Month.” In 2002, New York and Pennsylvania sent the most communities to the Best 100 list.

AMC is once again joined by the National Association for Music Education (MENC), the Music Teachers National Association (MTNA), the National School Boards Association (NSBA), Yamaha Corporation of America and VH1 Save the Music Foundation in creating the survey and interpreting the results. Perseus Development Corp. of Braintree, Mass., is donating its time and expertise to the survey partnership to implement the Web survey and to analyze the data.

The yearly survey measures a variety of data categories, including funding, enrollment, student-teacher ratios, participation in music classes, instruction time, facilities, support for the music program, participation in private music lessons, performance and competition opportunities and other factors. The survey is structured to allow smaller or less affluent communities to compete on an equal footing with larger or better-funded ones, by comparing resources committed to music with the overall resources available.

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