Lakeville sings praises of all-boys, girls choirs

Fourth hour hasn't even started, but the volume is already cranked way up in the choir room at McGuire Middle School. One boy bangs out "Mary Had a Little Lamb" on the piano, and other students in the all-boys choir are talking and laughing and generally making a racket.

The noise level doesn't go down much when choral director Karen Lutgen starts the lesson, but that's kind of the point. They're not all on pitch, but in a culture where choir is thought of as girly, at an age when their voices are cracking, these guys are actually singing.

"With the girls, you're embarrassed to sing high," said McGuire student Brian Wisnoski, 13. But in this class, "No one really cares."

For the past year, about 120 seventh-grade singers at McGuire have been split into separate choirs for boys and girls in a pilot program that went so well that the Lakeville school district recently gave its other two middle schools the same option for next year.

Segregating the choirs has made boys and girls alike more willing to sing out and test new skills, but that's not the only benefit, Lutgen said. It's also better for their voices.

Some boys going through voice changes "might have a tiny range of maybe three to four notes that really work for them," and a lot of choral music written for mixed children's choirs doesn't take that into account, she said. "They end up trying to sing something that just is not physically possible for them, and that's unhealthy."

In a choir for boys, "We can tailor the music to give them parts that they are capable of singing," she said. With the girls, meanwhile, "You can dig a little deeper and do more challenging stuff."

Teachers at several schools said they didn't know how common single-sex choirs are in Minnesota, but about a dozen schools statewide said they offered the classes in response to an informal e-mail query that McGuire teachers sent out when they were first researching the idea.

"I think it's becoming more common, because there's more research becoming available about gender-specific ensembles on a national basis," said Jo Anne Taylor, a vocal music teacher at Minnehaha Academy, a private Christian school in Minneapolis where boys and girls in grades 6-8 have been split into two choirs for the past three years.

When Taylor pitched the idea to the school about six years ago, she couldn't find enough research to show that it would benefit girls as well as boys. But when she looked a few years later, "Suddenly, there was a plethora of information about girls."

And single-sex education has generated talk among Minnesota music directors in recent years, with a full-day workshop devoted to the topic at the fall 2006 state convention of the American Choral Directors Association.

The National Association for Single Sex Education tallies about 380 U.S. public schools that offer single-sex classes, but many of those are in a core subject such as math or reading, said founder Leonard Sax.

But in an all-boys choir, he said, "You're going to find your boys love to sing, whereas in the co-ed choir, a lot of the girls sing, and the boys sit on their hands."

"They also encourage each other better," Taylor said of her boys' choir. "It's almost like a sports team cheering each other on when they are able to accomplish something."

It's not uncommon for high schools to have single-sex auditioned choirs, particularly for girls, and some split up freshmen, Taylor said.

But several teachers pointed out that scheduling is often a challenge for middle schools that consider single-sex classes. At McGuire, music teachers had to get the physical education department on board with a plan that involves having girls go to single-sex gym classes while the boys are in choir, and vice versa.

Because co-ed band students join the choir kids for gym, the scheme has resulted in some very large and some very small gym classes, Lutgen said, but a majority of the seventh-graders in a recent survey said they feel more comfortable in single-sex gym classes.

And in her classes, the energy level has gone way up, she said. "There were more times when they were mixed when I was begging them to sing."

Sarah Lemagie • 952-882-9016