Norwich — The Memorial Day parade on Monday will have a different look this year, featuring 35 excited and slightly nervous members of the Kelly Middle School Band in their first parade appearance since budget cuts in 2010 shuttered the program and shelved the instruments.

“It’s amazing!” eighth-grader Dina Jean Pierre, 14, said during a break in band practice at the Mahan Drive track across from Kelly. “I’ve never done this before.”

This is Jean Pierre’s first year in band. She’s really a classical music fan and plays piano. “But sometimes I gotta get loud,” she said. She'll bang the cymbals at Monday’s parade.

The parade steps off at noon from the Little Green on Broadway in front of the Cathedral of St. Patrick. The parade will march north along Broadway to Chelsea Parade, where Memorial Day ceremonies will take place at 1 p.m.

“I’m pretty nervous but excited at the same time,” eighth-grade snare drummer Jayden Bottomley, 13, said. “I was like ‘I don’t think I could make it.’ But I did.”

Kelly music teacher and band director Allison Beit said three years after the school reinstated band, it was time to put the students on the big stage. Someone sent her a photograph from a calendar showing a rather large contingent of uniformed members of the Kelly Junior High School Band marching in the May 7, 1967, Loyalty Day parade on Main Street.

Beit said the Memorial Day parade was a practical choice for a comeback, since it comes at the end of a full school year of practice, and because the route is “a straight line.” The Norwich Winter Festival parade, by contrast, crisscrosses downtown streets and can take a couple hours.

The 35 band members will wear their Kelly green band shirts and khaki shorts Monday. Beit will stay in the background, allowing the drumline to lead with signals and tunes — they figure they’ll have time for two tunes.

It will be their first parade, but not their first public performance, Beit said. The full 70-member Kelly Middle School Band has performed at the annual school Staff Follies talent show, at senior centers and last week at the schools’ All-City Art Show.

“I thought the parade would be an amazing thing to do,” Beit said. “I surveyed the students a couple weeks ago, and they were enthusiastic.”

Kelly and Teachers’ Memorial Middle School lost their instrumental music programs in 2010 — the last year Kelly marched in the Memorial Day parade — after budget cuts. Dozens of instruments, flutes, clarinets, trumpets, trombones and saxophones were shoved into a closet and sat unused.

In 2015, middle school music teachers approached the Norwich Public Schools Education Foundation, a private group that supports city schools, and asked for funding to repair and replace instruments. The foundation paid about $4,600 to repair and purchase new instruments, foundation Chairman Mark Cook said.

Since then, the foundation has continued to support the music programs with grants for repairs and maintenance and to buy new instruments and music for a music library, Cook said. The foundation approached donors with an “adopt-a-musician” campaign.

“Most of the donors expressed fond recollection of their children being involved in instrumental music in Norwich Public Schools and wanted to ensure that continues,” Cook said.

Teachers’ Memorial became a sixth-grade-only school in 2015, while Kelly became a seventh- and eighth-grade school. Both will return to traditional sixth- through eighth-grade middle schools next year, Kelly with a STEAM magnet theme and Teachers’ Memorial as a global studies school.

With the wind instruments now in good shape, Beit used part of the middle school magnet grant to purchase new bass and snare drums to create the drum line that will lead the parade.

“It’s really cool,” said Sarah Fedeli, 12, a seventh-grader who will play one of the bass drums. “I really wanted to do it.”

Many of the students have never been to the city’s Memorial Day parade, let alone performed in it. But eighth-grade clarinet player Alyssa Bohara, 13, is a veteran. She has marched in the Memorial Day parade as a Girl Scout.

“I was excited,” Bohara said of learning the band would perform. “I didn’t think we would. Usually, the high school does it.”

Yvette Jacaruso, chairwoman of the Board of Education and a member of the foundation board, called it “a breath of fresh air” that the band will perform Monday. She plans to attend and cheer loudly.

“I’m delighted the foundation had so much to do in getting them back on track in getting their instruments repaired,” Jacaruso said. “We were so thrilled to hear they are going to play on Memorial Day.”

c.bessette@theday.com