elementary schools county-wide, giving live demonstrations and providing the children with a rare opportunity to ask questions of symphony players. The students are then treated to a free concert at the Santa Cruz Civic or Mello Center in Watsonville, featuring guests of varied arts disciplines and musical styles. Members of the Santa Cruz County Youth Symphony join Symphony musicians onstage. Other recent collaborations have been with Santa Cruz Ballet Theatre, Kuumbwa Jazz Honor Band, Santa Cruz Shakespeare and Cabrillo Youth Chorus. For 2018, the Santa Cruz Symphony will incorporate Carnegie Hall's LinkUp program for the first time into their Youth Concerts. This program provides music and teaching materials for free to any schools in the county to teach students various pieces on recorders. The students then come to the Youth Concerts with their recorders and play with the Symphony. In order to increase the attendance to 5000 students, the Symphony will be performing the Youth Concerts at the Kaiser Permanente Arena in Santa Cruz for the first time. In 2012, the Symphony embraced another music education program – the Brummit-Taylor in-class classical music listening program. Geared toward elementary schools, this program enables teachers to introduce classical music to their students on a daily basis. The program targets second through fifth graders and was piloted in 2012 with 10 teachers in four schools. The Santa Cruz County Office of Education has been actively working with the Symphony to maximize the number of Classical Music Classrooms throughout the county. Currently, over 1500 students experience classical music daily in 17 of the County's 31 elementary schools. The goal is to reach every elementary school student in the county, at both public and private schools. In November 2016, the Arts Council of Santa Cruz County released its Arts Education Data Mapping Pilot Project and reported that over 50% of arts education programs in the schools in Santa Cruz County are music programs. In recognition of the work the Symphony has done with its music education programs, the Santa Cruz Symphony was named one of the top three providers of arts education in Santa Cruz County schools, after the schools themselves and the Arts Council. History factoids When the Symphony was first organized, musicians paid for the chance to play! Their membership dues were $1 each, plus a 25-cent contribution at each rehearsal. The symphony was called the Santa Cruz Symphony Orchestra at its founding