Middle School students from the Allentown School District painted the large, colorful canvases here at CMS, and we are proud to exhibit them in our studio hallways. These students learned about music, art, theater, and dance at City Arts Camp in summer 2019. The four, one-week tuition-free City Arts camps were fully funded by a generous grant from the Harry C. Trexler Trust. City Arts Camp for middle school students is held each July in the Dorothy H. Baker Recital Hall here at CMS. The Baum School teaching artist who worked with the students is Sean Delonas. Many of the canvases depict musicians from the Harlem Renaissance. Others depict animals playing musical instruments.

Our native plant garden in the front lawn is expanding, thanks to Girl Scout and CMS family member, Sammi Ciommo. Sammi is installing and maintaining the garden as part of her Gold Award Project. The plants were donated by BB&T with assistance from Edge of the Woods Native Plant Nursery. Sammi also conducted an “eco brick” building event. An eco brick is a strong plastic bottle filled completely with clean dry plastic to a certain density. It helps us utilize our resources with minimal waste processing and keeps plastic out of the environment. These bricks will be used to build a bench in the native plant garden at CMS.

We completed another round of soundproofing improvements in December. R.L. Reppert installed several new soundproofing measures in Studios 1-11. They worked all week starting very early in the morning to make sure everything was cleaned up and ready for our students each day.

We also renovated the bathrooms adjacent to the Dorothy H. Baker Recital Hall and completed the ambitious project just in time to host our back-to-back Holiday Recitals.