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Swampscott POPS launches Seats for a Song campaign!

Swampscott Patrons of Performing Students (POPS) announces the kickoff of “Seats for a Song,” a new campaign to raise funds for performing arts in the Swampscott public schools. This campaign replaces POPS’s highly successful “Save Me a Seat,” which was launched in 2007 to raise funds to make capital improvements in the Swampscott High School auditorium.

The Save Me a Seat campaign raised approximately $45,000 over four years by asking people to sponsor seats in the auditorium. Its goal was to complete the auditorium the way the architects had designed it. Paneling was added to the proscenium and to the “wing walls,” work handled by local contractor Paradise Construction. In addition, some funds paid for a new window for the sound for commemorative plaques on seats. Explains Doreen Hodgkin, a founding member of POPS and co-chair of the Save Me a Seat campaign, “This was a project that was initiated due to budget cuts to the theater section of the building, but it proved to be an opportunity for people to support the arts by paying tribute to loved ones and/or people who had made a difference in their lives. I am so glad I was able to be a part of this project.”

“We are extremely proud of what ‘Save Me a Seat’ accomplished,” says Penny Stratton, Hodgkin’s cochair and also a founding member of POPS. “Everyone who sponsored a seat is to be thanked for playing a role in helping to transform the auditorium.”

According to POPS president Carrie Kaplowitz, remaining Save Me a Seat funds (not quite $10,000) will be saved for inevitable needs in the future, such as repairs to the auditorium.

Because seat sponsorships proved so popular, POPS did not want to stop offering them. Anyone who wants to sponsor a seat can thus still do so, by contributing to the new “Seats for a Song” campaign. As with the previous campaign, a seat sponsorship will cost $225, and sponsors can choose an inscription to engrave on a plaque.

“Even though we needed to officially conclude Save Me a Seat because the major part of the capital improvements were done, we didn’t want to stop offering seat sponsorships,” Kaplowitz says. “People love them! They love coming into the auditorium and finding ‘their’ seat, with their own inscription on the plaque.”

“Seats for a Song” funds will not be limited to improving the auditorium, however, but will be available to support the performing arts in general, which is POPS’s mission. Founded as a nonprofit organization in 2004 by a group of parents, POPS helps raise funds for the performing arts in Swampscott public schools and also coordinates volunteers to provide hands-on assistance with refreshments, publicity, and myriad tasks. In the past, funds have been used to purchase risers; a sound system; a portable podium for the marching band; chorus dresses; and software for the piano lab at the high school—and to sponsor a night of the production Anything Goes in 2009. POPS also awards scholarships to four graduating seniors each year, recognizing students in each of the performing arts “arms”: chorus, band, piano, and drama.

A new “Seats for a Song” form will be posted at the POPS website, www.SwampscottPOPS.org, within the next few weeks, and copies of the form will be available at all performing-arts events. Anyone interested in joining POPS is invited to visit the website or to speak with members at a performing-arts event.

Download a sponsorship form here!