A music mentoring program that sends Tufts students to local elementary schools expanded last week to include the West Somerville Neighborhood School.
The Music Mentor Volunteer Program, which began last semester, aims to instill an appreciation of music in local youngsters by pairing each child with a student musician from Tufts.
"The Somerville students are assigned to a Tufts student who plays an instrument in the same family of instruments [as they do]," Tufts Coordinator of Applied Music Edith Auner said.
Before last week, the program had only served the East Somerville Community School. Even with the expansion, the Music Mentor Volunteer Program is still in its initial phases, and Auner hopes to continue working with Somerville officials and looking for ways in which the program can grow and improve.
Still, she doesn't want to overextend the participants
"I would only want the program to grow in ways that continue to have intense involvement from the music faculty of the schools," Auner said.
Tufts Director of Community Relations Barbara Rubel said that last week's expansion may be a small step towards repairing frayed town-gown relations between Somerville residents and Tufts.
"The music mentor program started in East Somerville, and that's not where residents are concerned about Tufts students," she said. "At the West Somerville school, you might get some of those parents and residents who are concerned."
Even so, Rubel said this is more than an effort to appease community members.
"The music mentor program is a terrific project, and we ought to be doing this and things like this just because they're good programs in and of themselves," she said. "Both Somerville and Tufts bring excited, dedicated students to the table and they all come away feeling good about the work they've done together."
Although the partnership's main goal is basic musical instruction, junior Kathryn Sheehan, one of the mentors, said that last semester, they accomplished more than that.
"We would play music, listen to music and sometimes just hang out. As music mentors, [we] were role models as well as music teachers," Sheehan said.
In addition to the mentoring program, an instrument donation program was also introduced last semester.
"We were aware that [local schools] really needed instruments for students to borrow," Rubel said.
The program was spearheaded by Ben Sands, a 1954 Tufts graduate, and has also enjoyed involvement from other alumni.
"The alumni put out a call to other alums to dig [around] and look for instruments that weren't being used any longer," Rubel said.
Program sponsors collected 12 instruments last semester for Somerville students who can't afford to buy or rent their own. This term, the goal is to collect more by increasing publicity, according to Rubel.
Giovanni Russonello contributed reporting to this article.
