Florence band members toured three countries in April
By: Eve Collins
FLORENCE The students chattered excitedly, trying to decide what the highlight of their trip was.
The castles. The cathedrals. The mountains. The answers varied greatly.
In front of teachers, parents and students Tuesday night, Florence Township Memorial High School band teacher Adrienne Mazar, along with a handful of students from the jazz band, presented photos of the group’s trip to Europe this spring.
For their first trip abroad, the students visited Germany, Austria and Italy. They left April 15 and returned April 23.
The short presentation was a portion of the Florence Township Board of Education’s regular meeting, where awards also were handed out to teachers of the year and to students for leadership.
"We want to thank the board for supporting our trip," Ms. Mazar said before the presentation. The board allowed the trip, even though many schools were canceling trips because of the war in Iraq. Ms. Mazar said the board made a "gutsy" move.
The photos presented at the meeting showed such landmarks as Neuschwanstein Castle in Germany, Mozart’s home in Salzburg, Austria, and the Coliseum in Rome, Italy.
"We were very well received," Ms. Mazar said. People even asked them to play patriotic music such as "The Star-Spangled Banner," she said.
The group traveled throughout the three countries, stopping only briefly in major towns for sightseeing.
"I liked the castles," said senior Ryan Southerland, a trumpet player. "I’m going to own one someday."
Chris Ferenzi, another senior, took almost 2,000 photos with his digital camera. He used some of the photos for the slide presentation Tuesday, which was accompanied by Louis Armstrong’s song, "What a Wonderful World."
Ninth-grader Katherine Melnyk said the scenery was her favorite part. "It was cool to see everyone’s reaction to it."
Ms. Mazar couldn’t quite decide what the highlight of the trip was for her. "It’s hard to say. It was one high after another," she said, but spoke very excitedly about the group’s audience with the pope during its tour of Rome.
The school’s annual Café Night in March had a theme that coincided with the trip. Students and parent volunteers decorated the middle school’s multipurpose room to look like the European landscape.
The band uses revenues from the event for a trip each year. Ms. Mazar depends on donations from residents and businesses in the community for food and decorations. This was the band’s first trip abroad, and students at the meeting said it would be the last for awhile because it takes so much for them to raise the funds. The cost of the trip was $1,950 per student.
The students wanted to express their gratitude to the community and school board. To do this, a slide, the final one in the presentation, read: "Thank you for the trip of our lives."

