LH Power Band gets head start on parade trip
PEARCY — The Lake Hamilton High School Marching Power Band of Arkansas is already nearly one-third of the way through its fundraising efforts to perform at the 2024 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City, the band’s director, Jon Shultz, said Friday.
Lake Hamilton band students in grades 7-12 were told of their invitation during a surprise ceremony Wednesday morning. The band is one of only six high schools in the United States invited to perform at the annual spectacle.
“You know, it’s an incredible opportunity to be a part of something that is so Americana,” he said on Friday.
“I mean, it’s iconic in our culture … and when you think that the three biggest things that are viewed on television — number one, of course, being the Super Bowl each year, number two is the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and number three is the Grammys — and so to be in that and to understand that our students will have about a minute performance … and then in the band world, it is well-known that the only bands that go there are the best of the best.”
Given the fact there are only about 10 bands total that perform in the parade — out of hundreds of applicants — Shultz said to be selected is “extremely humbling and very exciting.”
The band was invited in 2019 to perform in the 2021 London New Year’s Day Parade, but the trip was canceled following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Shultz, who has been with the district for 22 years, said they learned a lot about fundraising in preparation for that trip, and collected right at $100,000, which will go toward the New York trip.
“We learned a lot of lessons with London and so we started a fundraiser. The good Lord kind of takes care of you. We were beginning this text fundraiser right at the same time we found out this happens, and we had
significant amount of money that can go to students’ individual accounts over that,” he said.
The band’s next step is developing a team within its band parent organization, which will allow individuals and corporations to donate tax-deductible funds in many cases.
“We opened so many doors two years ago, three years ago, that I really feel that right now we can account for almost probably one-third of the money that’s needed to go already,” he said. “So what we really need is to write a few grants, and hopefully find some businesses that want to be a part of this, and some individuals, too.”
He noted the importance of donors knowing exactly where their money is going so they can know exactly how they helped.
Leaving on a Saturday and coming back the next, the band will travel by bus and get to spend nearly an entire week in the Big Apple. Staying in the Sheraton New York Times Square Hotel, Shultz said they plan on touring Central Park and visiting such locations as the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, the One World Trade Center, Radio City Music Hall, and Top of the Rock at Rockefeller Plaza. They also plan to take in a Broadway musical and take a boat trip down the Hudson River on the final night.
“I knew the Macy’s thing was a huge possibility for us, so we did a lot of our homework with that and did our due diligence and talked to the right people to make sure that our packet looked right,” he said of the application process.
To do this, he noted they brought 2008 alumnus Austin Hall, who has a degree in nonprofit grant writing.
“He graduated from the Clinton School (of Public Service) in Little Rock, and he actually is the one that did the actual paperwork and laid that part out,” he said. “And a lot of it can be attributed to that, because we knew the product we had was of the highest echelon; we just had to make sure that everything around it looked that way. And it was great to bring Austin in for that.”
The band’s “Power Band Country Music Jamboree” this fall was the performance that caught the attention of the Macy’s selection committee. While that will not be the band’s performance in the parade, Shultz said they have a year to develop a production that is “as authentic to who we are as we can be.”
“We’re just grateful for the total support of the community that we’ve received so far from the parents, the administration, here at the school, the board of education at Lake Hamilton, the teachers, and, you know, something that’s really been special is to see a lot of our alumni come back and speak about it on social media or see so many messages and so many congratulations. They’ve been a part of building up to us being able to do this.
“The saying goes, ‘These kids here don’t realize that they stand on the shoulders of giants.’ And there’s been some giants that have come through the program to help get us from the small-town little band that we were when I took over to (now). So we’re grateful for that.”