The Bemus Point Central School District held its regular board of education meeting Monday where board members participated in a demonstration of the new piano lab in the middle-high school. P-J photo by Jordan W. Patterson

BEMUS POINT — At a Bemus Point Board of Education meeting Monday, board and audience members played piano.

The music department gave presentations regarding recent developments inside its curriculum and what the department has to offer regarding instruments. Band teacher James Foley brought board members to the recently created piano lab where they were giving a demonstration on how the room functions.

The piano lab is actually quite quiet. The pianos are plugged into headphones where the sound is submitted through allowing students to hear only their work or the entire class’s work too, depending on the mode the pianos are in. The 17 pianos are all connected allowing variation in how a particular class is managed and can be changed throughout a class period. The pianos can be linked to the main piano enabling teacher-to-student sessions or they can be linked to the entire class allowing for full-group work.

“It’s like being in your own practice room with your own piano, but with some extra capabilities,” Foley said. “In the old days, it would be the teacher going from practice room to practice room to practice room. Well, now I just push a button.”

The room allows Foley to have more control in the classrooms and be more attentive to each student much faster. Those at the meeting were allowed to equip headphones and observe how the the pianos could be adjusted.

Additional presentations were provided by Kasey Way, elementary music teacher, and Julie Costantini, high-school music teacher. Way played a video of elementary students playing various songs on ukuleles and a video was played showcasing Costantini’s middle- and high-school students performing songs on guitar.

During Superintendent Michael Mansfield’s report, he discussed recent meetings he attended since the last board meeting that related to the district.

One of those included a tour of local businesses through the “Dream It Do It” program at Jamestown Community College. The tour took Mansfield and company through Weber Knapp and Artone. He said the employers he met with talked about the need for soft skills or core skills in addition to hard skills. Those skills include perseverance, initiative and dependability, Mansfield said.

“That’s the key thing,” Mansfield said about teaching soft skills. “As far as what we can do here in the district K-12, is to ingrain those skills in our students.”

He said manufacturing employers in Chautauqua County are concerned about the needed reinforcement of soft skills in the education system as it relates to the workforce.

Mansfield also attended a meeting regarding eight-man football sponsored by New York State Section 6. He said schools in the B-class of Section 6 attended the meeting emphasizing that the meeting wasn’t limited to the smaller C- and D-class schools as well as decreased participation in football around the state. He said there will be an option for Section 6 schools to play eight-man football instead of 11-man for the 2019 football season.

“You just have to have people to play,” Mansfield said.

The district’s football team functioned this year on its own, but has merged other various sports in the past.

The guidelines for eight-man football require 12 healthy players at any time to qualify compared to the 17- healthy players required for the traditional 11-man league for a team to be eligible.

“It’s football, but a little bit more wide open,” Mansfield said.

Districts that elect to field an eight-man team can choose to go back to an 11-man team in the future. Mansfield said the high school as of Monday, had 19 players planning to be on the team next year, noting that the total was three players away from not being able to field a team.

“There were some interesting points made (at the meeting) about eight-man football,” he said.

In other news, Mansfield attended a consortium meeting, made up of seven school districts that share services. There, the meeting focused on transportation and how districts could potentially share related services to schools that are struggling with transporting students to off-site locations. Mansfield said the transportation directors of districts within the consortium will attend the next meeting to brainstorm additional methods to share services.