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GHS student's 'Project Cultivate' concert benefit food for thought
Music, so it has long been said, hath charms to soothe the savage breast.
Whether or not it might be able to solve school lunchroom issues is another thing. It’s food for thought anyway.
But Greencastle High School junior Parker Black, 17, is about to find out when the benefit concert he has organized -- Project Cultivate -- is staged Friday, April 27 at the Inn at DePauw.
The 7-10 p.m. concert will feature three local music acts -- War Radio (fronted by Joel and Tosh Everson), Gun Moon (aka Anthony Mullis) and Dreadful Greta. Black, a two-time participant in the Putnam County Star competition at the fair, plays guitar and sings in Dreadful Greta along with Cliff Gammon of Greencastle and two DePauw students from Putnam County, Taulbee Jackson of Cloverdale and Lucas Eckrich of Greencastle.
Admission is $5 for students and $10 for adults and tickets will be available at the door.
It is what Parker Black wants to do with the funds the concert raises that sets this event apart.
He wants to solve a problem with the lunch system at Greencastle schools, specifically the alternative meal that provides a nominal lunch -- peanut butter sandwich, vegetable or fruit, a graham cracker and milk -- when a student doesn’t have lunch money for the day or his or her account runs dry and they have no way to pay for the pizza or salisbury steak on that day’s hot lunch menu.
The rule is a high school student cannot charge a meal when that happens, so he or she gets the alternate meal, Black explained.
It seems the students who get caught up in that bind are like the lunchroom middle class, those struggling to make ends meet, not the kids in the free and reduced lunch program or those born with the proverbial silver spoon in their mouth.
Black wants to set up an account at local Greencastle schools, from the primaries through GHS, using the proceeds from Friday’s benefit concert and other activities to come -- he sees it as an annual service project -- to fund school lunches for those who otherwise might end up with the basic, so-called alternative lunch offering.
“Hey, if it’s going to be a dollar or two out of the alternate lunch account, so be it,” said Black, who had to go talk with Greencastle School Superintendent Jeff Hubble to work out the details.
“I was pretty nervous about that,” he said, calling it “a huge hurdle.”
Under his plan, students able to draw from the account his benefit concert establishes would get the full-meal-deal hot lunch provided at the school, but no extras like two desserts or a second beverage.
According to Black’s Projectcultivatebenefit.com website, the order in which the bands will play Friday is: Dreadful Greta, 7-7:30 p.m.; Gus Moon, 7:45-8:30 p.m.; and War Radio, 8:45-9:30 p.m.