Wheatland Crossing creates school anthem

Adelle Ellis
Times Reporter

 

Students from the new Wheatland Crossing School recently worked together to create a new school anthem.
As part of the creative process, students were first treated to an hour-long history of rock music on Feb. 16, when Speed Control, a rock n’ roll band from the Yukon, entertained the students with rock music from the 1960s to the 2000s.
After hearing the band perform and learning about the evolution of music and song fun facts, groups of students from Grades 1 to 11 worked with the band to come up with ideas to write a school song.
“We are creating this song together as students and teachers, and it is ours – it’s not something we are adopting, we are creating it,” said Sean Latta, associate principal at Wheatland Crossing School (WCS). “When you create something like this, you take ownership and pride in it, and that is what we are doing with our school. The students are creating the culture of our school.”
Speed Control is a band created by three teachers: Graeme Peters, Jody Peters and Ian March, based in the Yukon. In addition to shows of their original music, they have a passion for music education, and have played concerts in 300 schools, playing to upwards of 150,000 students. They’ve written and recorded 31 “rawk” anthems with students and teachers in the past two years. To date, Speed Control has helped create 35 school songs, one of which was for Hussar School before it merged into WCS.
Throughout the day, the band made notes of ideas and sentences the students came up with associated with WCS. Speed Control will write and create the music and lyrics before professionally recording the song in a studio to send back to the school to use.
“We don’t know how the song is going to turn out but we trust our students and we trust the group, and we are looking forward to hearing what the end product will be,” said Latta. “[This song] is another thing we can use to weave the fabric of our communities together. We are four communities together as one and we’ve built this together. This is going to be our song.”