The outgoing president of the San Diego Youth Symphony explains how he helped rebuild music ed in San Diego area schools: “We started with violins and cellos and violas and double bass. Actually we put third graders on double bass. We started that because we had asked the leaders in the community and the principals of the schools what instruments would be the right instruments to start with and the response we got was We have a tradition of string instruments in our community. We believe that there would be a strong response to string instruments. So when we first started this was 2010 we saw that kids were simply behaving better in their classes and as a result there was less disruption in the class. And that meant everybody was learning better in the class.”