Keeping the Beat Pt. 1: What is music therapy and how does it help the students at Bynum School?
MIDLAND, Texas (KOSA) - The music therapy program at Bynum School in Midland has been around for over two decades and has a lot of success stories.
Tera Glover had never heard of music therapy until she received a brochure about it from a different college than the one she was attending.
She felt such a draw towards that career path she immediately transferred to Eastern New Mexico University to become a music therapist.
Tera graduated and moved to Midland to start running the neurologic music therapy program at Bynum in August 2002.
The first music therapy program at Bynum initially just had four or five students.
But over the last 22 years, Tera has grown the program and helped hundreds of students.
One of her first students still works with her to this day.
Tera is a neurologic music therapist.
That means she uses music to build new pathways in the brain to help the students she works with.
One of the methods she uses is rhythmic auditory stimulation.
Gait is the way that people walk. Everyone has a slightly different gait and that is one of the things Tera works with her students on.
They started working on Kyndai’s gait and she’s been able to walk longer distances on her own.
Other methods include music attention control training to help students with concentrating for longer periods of time and therapeutic singing to help the student use their vocal cords to speak.
At Bynum School, it is all hands on deck for each program.
The teachers at Bynum continue the music therapy into the classroom on days that the student does not meet with Tera.
While she is appreciative of the other teachers, it’s the students that make the biggest difference for Tera.
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