Educator, conductor, builder

Cathy LaFrombois is a music educator, conductor, and oboist in Appleton, Wisconsin. She is the founder and executive director of the Valley Troubadours Homeschool Music & Theater Program, where she also serves as Director of Bands & Choirs, and executive director of the National Association of Homeschool Music Educators (NAHME), which connects homeschool families with bands, choirs, and orchestras near them and supports the directors who start them.

She has taught music for more than thirty years. She began as a band and choir director in K–12 schools in Illinois, Wisconsin, and North Carolina. Her ensembles have earned Division I ratings and Exemplary Performance Awards.

She founded Valley Troubadours in Appleton in 2013 to give homeschooled students access to the kind of ensemble experience she had led in conventional schools. It began with two band classes, two choir classes, and a borrowed room. Today it serves nearly 800 students, with about 1,500 class registrations across some 50 music, theater, and performing arts classes for students from kindergarten through adulthood. In 2023 the organization purchased a 24,000-square-foot facility, which now also hosts homeschool co-ops, community ensembles, and concerts.

Her current work asks what music education outside the conventional school system can teach the wider profession about access, rigor, community, and belonging. Her essay “What Homeschool Families Are Teaching Us about Community Music Education” was published by the National Association for Music Education in October 2026.

She is a member of NAfME, the Wisconsin Music Educators Association, the American Choral Directors Association, the Wisconsin Choral Directors Association, the National Band Association, and the Wisconsin Concert Band Association.

How Valley Troubadours began

People often assume there was a master plan. There was not. The first classes filled, so we split them. When those filled, we added beginning strings, then theater, then early-childhood music for younger siblings who came along and did not want to sit in the hallway. Each new offering was a response to a family who asked, “Do you have something for my child, too?”

Three decisions mattered most. We refused to lower the bar. We hired working educators and paid them as professionals. And we invested in a building of our own, because renting by the hour caps what a program can become.

Valley Troubadours has its own website: valleytroubadours.com
NAHME’s national registry and director resources: nahme.org

Three vantage points

I have experienced traditional music education as a professional educator, homeschooling as a parent, and community-based music education as the founder of a large program. Most writing about homeschooling comes from outside it: policy, regulation, headcounts. Most writing about music education assumes a school.

From where I stand, homeschool families do not look like a fringe. They look like a large, deeply networked community that organizes co-ops, leagues, and productions, and that wants serious musical training for its children. That observation is where my current writing and research begin.