After a semester of change for Coppell High School, including updates to each hallway and a new principal, the CHS Band Hall is being overhauled for the first time since 1999.

“Beyond a little bit of carpeting work around 10 years ago, not a lot has been changed,” CHS band director Gerry Miller said. “We’ve been allowed to expand some of the areas, to put it in a modern kind of architectural term; we’re trying to make more open spaces so we have more flexibility from a teaching perspective.”

The band hall was built to sustain a program of 200 but now fits 465 students. Due to the size of the program, two bands are scheduled to practice in one class period, forcing one band to fit into an ensemble room, meant for a single section.

“They’re taking out some of the storage rooms to increase the size of those band halls,” CHS associate principal Sean Bagley said. “The big band hall will pretty much stay the same, going to get a facelift, but they’re hoping to increase the size of the ensemble rooms to fit everyone.”

To increase space with the square footage the band hall currently has, construction will be doing away with underutilized spaces to move around walls. 

“We’re not really able to add square footage to the building, and that’s been one of the things that we needed,” Miller said. “We’re trying to make a small space work with just moving some walls around, but we haven’t really been allowed to expand out.”

Changes will include larger ensemble rooms, a larger color guard room and more space for uniform storage, along with the fitting of secure instrument lockers.

“We’ve not had instrument lockers here in Coppell, and this will be the first time that rather than having shelves in a storage room, we’ll have secured instrument lockers,” Miller said. “We think it’ll help them to feel a little bit safer, a little bit more secure with all of their personal belongings staying there throughout the day.”

Currently, the band is housed in the CHS Auditorium.

“It’s not really an interruption so much as it is something different,” CHS sophomore Sofia Ufret said. “At times, though, like when we had to move all of our things out of the Auditorium for a concert, [it was] a bit of a hassle.”

The band’s directorial staff, though, has been working out of the back of the auditorium with makeshift offices.

“Moving here and having to share this space with our theater and choir counterparts makes us very thankful for the space we have,” Miller said. “I know our private lesson staff will be excited to get back into the studios they call home. For us, we’re ready for a more traditional way to get work done.”

For the band, the most major change will be the difference in sound quality.

“We’ve done a lot of work with our acoustical team to get the sound levels a little more live in there,” Miller said. “It’s actually a pretty dead space, the way it was designed, in terms of reverb, and we want to get more roundness in the sound there and have things sound more realistic, so when we shift as a rehearsing ensemble from the band hall into the auditorium for concerts, the student experience is not audibly very different.”

Along with more major changes, the band hall will be undergoing the same facelift the rest of the school has undergone.

“The area beyond the carpet and a couple of other things haven’t been repainted, thoroughly gutted and redone in about 20 years,” Miller said. “That’s something you want to do every 10 years as a school. Most schools have about a seven to 10-year rotation on renovations like this, we’re caught in a weird spot fine arts wise where it hasn’t come down to this side of the building.”

Construction is scheduled to end in early March.

“This is the first step in a process that we need to continue to study as we find ways to build our growing program,” Miller said.

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