Kingsley High School band performs at Michigan State Capitol in Lansing

A Kingsley band carried its small-town sound into the Michigan State Capitol in Lansing, where Sen. Ed McBroom invited the Kingsley High School Symphony Band for a spring performance that doubled as a public salute to one of northern Michigan’s most durable school music programs.

For Kingsley Area Schools, the moment went well beyond a single trip south. The district says its band program is the largest student group in the school system and reaches students from grades 5 through 12, making it one of the most visible parts of daily school life. In a community where school news often centers on budgets, staffing and facilities, the Capitol appearance gave families a different headline: a local program earning recognition on a state stage.

The performance fit a long pattern. Kingsley Schools says the high school band has earned straight 1s at District Festival for 13 straight years, while the middle school band has done the same for 15 consecutive years. The district also says its bands have qualified for state competition for the past 11 years, a run that shows the Capitol invitation was built on consistency, not novelty.

Band director Lance Dubay has been at Kingsley Area Schools since 2018 and has become closely tied to that stretch of success. In May 2025, he won the Michigan School Band and Orchestra Association District II Teacher of the Year award and was named a Top 16 candidate for State Teacher of the Year. Kingsley says he had been nominated for the district honor five years in a row and later became a member of the American School Band Director Association.

The connection with McBroom also had a personal note. McBroom and Dubay played in a band together during college, and Dubay later became a teacher at Kingsley High School. That relationship helped open the door to a performance in a room where students from a small district could be heard far beyond Grand Traverse County.

Kingsley’s band program has already shown it can reach outside the county line. In 2022, the Kingsley Marching Stags were invited to perform with the Northern Michigan University marching band at Band Day, and Kingsley was the only band from Michigan’s Lower Peninsula invited that year. The Capitol appearance added another marker to that record, placing Kingsley students in one of the state’s most recognizable civic spaces and reinforcing a simple point: in Kingsley, music is not a side activity, it is a core part of the district’s identity.