In 2011, a grant was awarded to the Oaklawn Elementary School to purchase 49 instruments(drums) through the Remo music corporation. Timothy Lutz, the writer of this grant and music teacher at Oaklawn, wanted his students to have more exposure to West African and Latin music for the World Music Drumming curriculum. This curriculum was developed by Dr. Will Schmid who taught at UW-Milwaukee. The purpose of this program was to teach students more about music and to assist them in becoming better musicians.  While the students had already been learning about music through singing and playing instruments from many different cultures, they have expressed that playing instruments is something they would like to do more often in class. Student response to the drums have been very positive and a good number of students have joined the percussion section of the middle and high school bands.
The students at Oaklawn Elementary have just wrapped up their World Music Drumming course this month and have shared with the Foundation some photographs of them playing with the drums that were purchased with this grant.
