The Middle School Raider Band honored various members of the Ransom Everglades community during a spring performance filled with lively pieces and fun surprises. The band's final concert of the school year, "Songs of 'Honor and Excellence'" on May 12 began with a slideshow recognizing staff and faculty, and it included guest appearances by a sixth-grade rock band and two-person faculty rock band that performed with ... actual rocks. Photo Gallery
The band students showed their progress and versatility, performing on the traditional band instruments and some non-traditional ones. Band members provided occasional vocal accompaniment, as well as hand-clapping and foot-stomping, and the last piece, "Junk Funk," included four drummers working their magic on overturned paint buckets.
Interim Head of the Middle School Karen Thompson and math teacher Alina Mendoza took the stage to accompany the band on piano and by pounding rocks together in a piece appropriately called "Geology: The Study of Rock."
Sixth-grade students in the RE Rock Band – Harlan Hoenig '28 (singer), Israel Garcia '28 (piano), Isaac Zide '28 (bass), Lucas Noblet '28 (drums) – played "Wish You Were Here" and "Let it Be," and eighth graders Edwin Carr '26 (trombone) and Emilia Awad '26 (flute) performed solos in celebration of their "graduation" from the middle school band.
Throughout, band director Cathi Leibinger shared with the audience details about each piece. She also summoned newly accepted RE students in the audience, and those who expect to attend in the future, to the stage for a welcome and their first RE cookies.
Beginning Band FLUTE Israel Garcia ’28
CLARINET Will Brown ’28 Aly Kaplan ’28 Joey Louis ’28 Alex Quintero Kontopoulos ’28 Yiani Tettamanti ’28
Founded in 1903, Ransom Everglades School is a coeducational, college preparatory day school for grades 6 - 12 located on two campuses in Coconut Grove, Florida. Ransom Everglades School produces graduates who "believe that they are in the world not so much for what they can get out of it as for what they can put into it." The school provides rigorous college preparation that promotes the student's sense of identity, community, personal integrity and values for a productive and satisfying life, and prepares the student to lead and to contribute to society.