Delilah Sills believes that every child who wants to learn to play a musical instrument, should have the opportunity to do so. “It would make the world sound amazing and it would be a happy place with beautiful music,” she said.

Delilah is a second grader at Apalachee Tapestry Magnet School of the Arts (ATMSA) and she’s been playing the violin since the first grade. She enumerated the various benefits she’s gained from her instruction. “You make new friends. You hear music and you get to learn how the process goes. I love the violin, playing it, plucking it, learning new songs, learning new patterns and making new memories that I can look back on when I grow up and say, ‘I had a good childhood.’” 

Her classmate, Trenton Penny, is also enthralled with the violin. He enjoys exploring new rhythms and refining foundational skills related to the proper hand and finger placement. “We do ‘candy cane’ fingers when we hold the bow. Your fingers should be curved like a candy cane,” he explained. Though he easily rattled off examples of the mechanics of his playing, he confessed “I’m not that good at describing my feelings about playing. I like using my violin to do that for me.” 

This is exactly what their strings teacher, Jimmy Gillis is hoping for. “When you have trouble expressing yourself, that’s a source of frustration,” he said. “A class like this helps them with that. They’re learning that to express yourself, you have to have a skill set, whether it’s language or violin skills.”

Gillis has been teaching music at ATMSA for more than 20 years and he developed a full time strings program more than a decade ago. “That’s a unique thing,” he said. “If a public school has strings, it’s usually a fifth-grade program but it’s very rare to have it start as a first-grade program.” He knows of only one other public elementary school in the state that offers a class like this to first graders.

There are no costs associated with the program. Students have access to instruments, music and instruction as part of the regular curriculum. As a Title 1 school, ATMSA has a large concentration of low-income students and Gillis explained, “it would be hard to get parents to think of investing in something like this for a first grader, but the school provides everything for them, from head to toe.”

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