So, Friday, March 29, my sister and I walked out of the band room for the last time and as the door clicked shut, we couldn’t help but instantly have tears well up inside of us. We both cried the majority of the way home.

Saturday morning, demolition crews arrived at New Prairie High School to begin stripping out and demolishing the auditorium, band, and choir rooms. It was such an odd feeling knowing that, when I return after spring break, the home that I had lived in for four years was now no longer there. The place of which I have so many fond memories won’t exist.

The school administration says our new band room will be finished by August 1st, before the start of my senior year. I hope it will but, I’m not sure if it will ever feel like home. I don’t believe there is a time on a clock that I didn’t see in that band room. It’s the place where we as a band family have laughed and cried, sweat and froze, loved and were loved, and sometimes even bled a little. Where we would sleep between rehearsals, stumble in at 3am Sunday morning after having left at 3:30 am Saturday for a 24 hour show choir/Backup band competition.

The memories I’ll just have to hold closer, let not one slip away. I keep the numbers over the door, so no matter where I am, I’ll “be home.”

Tell me please, has your school ever remodeled your band room? It’s so odd to see it empty once you’ve cleaned it out. Has anyone had similar feelings ever?

My marching band is a community band, so we don't really have a permanent home. We kind of shuffle between 4 locations depending on our needs and the availability.

One of our main locations used to be a 50 year old community centre in a run down part of town (to give you an idea how beat up it is, I once got stuck in the bathroom when the doorknob fell out of the door).

Well, as part of a project to bring life back into the community (most of it is parking lots now), they're converting it into a "Youth Campus" for us and several other your arts organizations. The community centre has been renovated, with several new dance studios. They built an outdoor amphitheatre, building 3 arts schools (one of them uses part of an old bread factory), several old buildings are converted into performance spaces, a plaza is being built and a field replaced for our use (the field is extremely dusty, and the past couple years we've covered it with tiles that are slippery and have little bumps that are painful to kneel on). They're also building an Opera House on the property, and there's a proposal for a new NHL arena on the next lot over.