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Meet The High School Music Choir Helping Students with Disabilities

As American author Sarah Dessen wrote in her book, Just Listen, “Music is the great unifier.” Music therapy is becoming a helpful tool in classrooms and private settings. (Englewood Hospital and Medical Center has used music therapy to help patients.) And now, one school is using the power of music to help students with special needs.

Karen Gorzynski, choral director at Somerville High School, sat down with Steve Adubato, PhD. to discuss how her choir class is changing the lives of students with disabilities on Caucus: New Jersey with Steve Adubato.


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Music as Therapy

Every year, the Somerville High School Chamber Choir works with students from Midland School — a non-profit special education school — to put on a show. Gorzynski reached out to Linda Lara, the choir teacher at Midland School, after meeting her at an award ceremony. When asked why she reached out to Lara, Gorzynski replied, “I am so moved by her having a choir in that school … that she has a choir with those kids was so powerful to me,” she said. “I just thought more people should know about it.”

The program also enriches the lives of the students involved. “It opens their hearts to accepting students with special needs,” says Gorzynski. “They would not be together unless we took this trip.”

Want to find out more about how the universal language of music helps students with disabilities? Then watch this edition of Caucus: New Jersey with Steve Adubato.

For more stories that impact New Jersey residents, click over to our Hot Topics in NJ series.

Caucus Educational Corporation

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