SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Recently retired Edmonds Mayor Dave Earling has been named president of the Edmonds Music4Life Booster Club. The announcement comes today from David Endicott, Co-Founder and Chairman of Music4Life. Joining Earling on the booster club is Adm. Bill Center, US Navy Ret. and 2006-07 president of Seattle Downtown Rotary.
Music4Life is a non-profit that provides donated and repaired musical instruments at no charge to ten local public school districts (including Edmonds) for use by students benefiting from free or reduced lunch programs.
Earling served as the Mayor of Edmonds from 2011-19 and for a total of 21 years of service to the City of Edmonds. Previously, he had owned a real estate firm, but was best known as a music professor and founder of the instrumental music program at Shoreline Community College. Center is a long-time Edmonds resident who recently moved to Mukilteo. Earling and Center will be assisted in their new duties by Ken Noreen and Dennis Ashbrook, two noted instrumental music educators now retired from Shoreline Public Schools.
“Local enthusiasts who share our values of service to ‘kids,’ ‘instrumental music’ or ‘education’ are welcome to join us on the Edmonds booster club,” Earling said.
Research shows that students who participate in school instrumental music activities do better in math, science, history, literature, international languages, reading and writing, even in computer science, in addition to what it teaches in terms of teamwork and self-discipline. Not all children want to participate in instrumental music activities, of course. “But for those who do and whose families cannot afford a musical instrument,” Endicott says, “this effectively bars them from getting the full basic education guaranteed them by the Washington State Constitution. And the sad fact is that, in today’s economy, many families cannot even afford to rent a musical instrument. So Music4Life is just as much an equal opportunity program as it is an instrumental music program.”
Ready-to-play musical instruments are provided to these school districts for use by students in any musical activity they choose, as long as they stay enrolled in that public school district. “We figure that the more they use them, the better they’ll get,” Endicott says. “If they leave the school district for any reason, such as graduation or the family moves, the instrument needs to be returned to the school district so another student can benefit from its use.”
