The skies were cloudy, dull with rain and grey, but that wasn’t what caught the attention of the students surrounding the Liberty North football field. From the sky, a KMBC News helicopter flew down and landed right onto the practice soccer field. Liberty North High School was seen on the KMBC 9 News for the Banding Together for Teachers event on August 22nd.

“This morning KMBC 9 is coming and they are doing a celebration of highlights of local high school’s. They are trying to showcase the bands so they have a theme of Banding Together of Teachers. So this morning we are here to honor the band at Liberty North High School, and all the excellence that our high school represents,” Principal Precious Kurth said.

KMBC traffic reporter Johnny Rowlands came to Liberty North to surprise teachers. Rowlands came flying down in a helicopter on the practice soccer field. He then walked over to teachers and band members, to welcome them to be on the news for back to school special. He came with KMBC red cups for the teachers to say welcome to back to school.

“We are doing five schools this week, we started on Monday and what’s really cool is we had a cancellation on Monday for one of the schools. So we had this opening for it today. We got with Dallas and folks at Liberty North High School put this together in a heartbeat. Other schools have known about it for a month or so and Liberty North had a great turn out,” Reporter Johnny Rowland said.

Band instructor Shane Fuller has worked at Liberty North for years, and he didn’t know about the interview until the night before it was going to happen. Fuller was excited that the band would get to perform on television. Students and Fuller came in the morning to practice before going on the news.  The band had done the songs a couple of times for the news.

“Well, it was a lot of fun. It was somewhat unexpected, we just learned of this yesterday. I’m proud of the students and staff for being able to come in a little early and be prepared to represent our school and community with such little notice. But it was fun and I am glad we had the opportunity. All of it has been things we have been working on since July that we have been playing  so we just kind of do our normal routine,”  Fuller said.