Highlights

Our Sequim-based children’s string program has a new name and renewed mission! Registration has opened today, August 1st, for returning students and will open August 7th for new students. With brand new registration software to ease the burden on our volunteers, and internal administrative changes to help the program flourish, we are excited to welcome young students from first grade and up from Sequim, Chimacum, and Port Angeles to our Fall classes starting September 22nd at Swisher Hall between 3:30 and 5:30 with Sara Baldwin.

Existing Students: Register Now!

New? Join our Mailing List

Have questions? Email registrar@sequimcommunityorchestra.org.

Introducing …

Letter from Sequim Community Orchestra Board President For Current SCO String Kid Parents and Friends of the Sequim Community Orchestra

The Olympic Peninsula has a nearly centuries-long history of supporting orchestra performance and education, and an incredibly vibrant and lively community of organizations, orchestras, public educators, and private teachers. Youth orchestra in particular in this community helped shape the current generation of both musical and community leaders, growing community involvement with participants from historical organizations like the North Olympic Youth Symphonies and engendering students with lifelong musical fluency. Programs from the 1980s onwards for All-City String Orchestra and NOYS list distinguished performance artists and educators such as James Garlick, Richard O’Neill, Cheryl Swoboda, Traci Winters Tyson, Morgan Bartholick-LeMaire, Jesse Ahmann, and many more.

Youth Orchestra isn’t only for professionals, though. I can point to many non-music professionals in the NOYS programs who became pillars of the community, one in particular a federal congressional representative.

On a personal note, I participated in the North Olympic Youth Symphonies back in the 90s and my life was heavily impacted by youth orchestra, even though I did not become a professional musician. As a private school student, the after school orchestra program run out of Stevens by Phil and Deborah Morgan-Ellis (NOYS) was a lifeline into the community at large. When I finally entered public high school in 1998, the friends I made in youth orchestra helped welcome me to my new school, and in the years since, playing music in a group has always been critical to feeling connected to the community everywhere I have lived. My husband and I met in North Olympic Youth Symphonies, and later played together in high school in the Chamber music group, before finally marrying years later after I returned from university. Although neither of us ended up as professional musicians, music, and youth orchestra in particular has blessed our lives and we enjoy playing with both the Port Angeles Symphony Orchestra and the Sequim Community Orchestra, depending on how much time we have available with our little kids!

I was welcomed back to the Olympic Peninsula in 2016 and have enjoyed getting to know all the professionals (and non-professionals!) currently involved in our musical community. In 2023, I joined the SCO board as a director and started helping with outreach for our concerts. In June 2025, I was elected SCO Board President. The current board consists of Julie Novak as Secretary, Lisa McMillian as Treasurer, and Scott Schmidt as Vice-President. Carol Koenig will be assisting as a program director.

Our current board is extremely grateful to outgoing board members Justin Knobel and Julie Knobel for working so hard to provide a fiscally responsible well-administered organization for us to step into.

Board Context

One of the major questions that immediately faced our new board was the looming deadline for the Fall children’s program and any outreach or changes we might be doing to help our upcoming student enrollment drive be successful enough to create a budget-neutral program for the Fall fiscal year and also sustainable enough for future years and future boards. If we look at the success metrics I care the most about, like “Are the students enjoying playing in a group and advancing their skills?”, the SCO children’s program has been a success for a dozen years despite setbacks and challenges in both its construction, administration, funding, and fluctuating class sizes. The pandemic also produced unique problems that our previous board was forced to navigate. Youth orchestras will always have challenges in many areas as young students learn what best suits their interests and time, and as administrators seek to find qualified and engaged volunteers to help administer the program as parents come and go with their students. These kinds of challenges should be expected.

Historical Context

With NOYS dissolved since 2008, the Port Angeles community has been without a youth orchestra so long that an entire generation of young performers on the Peninsula has now gone without the benefit of those programs. This particularly affects private school string students and home school students, but also affects the school system as youth orchestras often act as a secondary place to get excited about music, learn to perform outside of our district classes, and meet new orchestra friends.

For students in the school district who would like extra practice with a group, or who would like to perform at a different level than their classmates, youth orchestras can be particularly valuable. A well-constructed youth orchestra can act as a bridge between existing elementary, middle, and high school students, bringing together students in groups not easily logistically possible during school hours. For students who thrive with competition, regularly seeing students play their instrument from across the Peninsula can be extra motivating. But I think ultimately youth orchestra is about making kids feel connected.

Our Decision

The SCO board wants to avoid creating empires, but we do want to build community. For that reason, we have changed the name of our children’s program for strings to the Peninsula Community Youth Orchestra. We now welcome and encourage children first grade and up who can read from across the Peninsula to come and join us at Swisher Hall in Sequim in Carrie Blake Park during the school year to learn an instrument, connect with fellow string students, and improve their skills. We hope you are as excited as we are about this change!

Going Forward

Something that you quickly learn is that the effort to perform outreach and recruiting for our children’s orchestra successfully far exceeds the effort to do so for the adult orchestra, which makes our position as board members complicated. The SCO, as a training orchestra, is well-suited to dovetail with a children’s program as children advance out of our children’s program ideally between 6th and 8th grade and then can enter the SCO. (We hope our best students can eventually advance into the Port Angeles Symphony!)

Since the inception of the program, though, we have occasionally struggled to adequately handle the administrative complexity of running what is essentially two separate organizations, one of which we as board members do not directly participate in or have children in and requires many more volunteer hours to be successful, and one which we play in as members.

To help reduce this discrepancy in effort, this year we have added some additional free web software from Jovial (based in Seattle) to assist with program administration, billing, and bookkeeping, and to better communicate with the parents. In addition, we are working carefully to reduce the load on our classroom coordinator so that her position can be more sustainable and have extracted the responsibilities of registrar and temporarily moved them to the position of SCO Board president. We are actively seeking a volunteer with sufficient organizational skills and the time to help with those registrar tasks after the Fall term.

Many parents from the program wrote in the recent parent survey responses how much they enjoyed and appreciated Sara Baldwin’s teaching expertise, and I was so gratified to hear that. Sara has been teaching the children’s program since 2022 and we are happy to have her back this fall. Very intentionally, our youth instructor Sara is the only person in the PCYO who is paid. In the SCO, our music director Phil Morgan-Ellis is the only person who is paid. All other positions are staffed by volunteers.

At Large

From a wider perspective, the SCO board is also actively engaged with the previously mentioned extremely vibrant musical community on the Peninsula in pursuing sustainable and long-term solutions to ensure our children’s program will always receive what it needs to flourish, while also pondering the long-term goal of supporting youth orchestra participation across the Olympic Peninsula. Despite the name change, due to the Sequim school district not having a student string orchestra program at all, we will always have a program base in Sequim to ensure that young children with long bedtime rituals and early bedtimes can access the orchestra classes with convenience.

Thank you.

The SCO board welcomes comments and contributions, especially from within the musical community, or from administrative, legal, and financial experts for non-profits, as we navigate our new roles.

The SCO also gratefully welcomes donations. SCO members have voted multiple times in the last few years to increase our membership dues to subsidize the children’s program, so that tuition can remain as low as possible and we can offer scholarships as needed to students without means to otherwise join the program. Securing grant funding for programs like ours is more difficult than ever, and the SCO and PCYO has operated without grant funding since Fall 2024 and will be operating entirely on donations, dues, and tuition in the 2025/2026 year.

Case Schmidt

About Us

The SCO is a charitable organization promoting the teaching and performance of orchestral music. Our strings education program, the Peninsula Community Youth Orchestra, holds string classes for children and the Sequim Community Orchestra provides a community orchestra open to beginning and intermediate players of all ages and presents performances and informative programs for the public.

The Team

• PCYO Instructor Sara Baldwin
• PCYO Classroom Coordinator Amanda Westman
• SCO President Case Schmidt
• SCO Vice-President Scott Schmidt
• SCO Secretary Julie Novak
• SCO Treasurer Lisa McMillian
• SCO Director Carol Koenig