My mother is a nurse who was one of the volunteers honored at yesterday's event. In a phone conversation after the luncheon, she mentioned that the singing portion had simply been skipped; there were no replacement students or anything (even though it remained on the printed program, there being no time to reprint the program).
My mother also relayed the Red Cross' line on the issue: this was a manufactured controversy by conductor Cherilyn Bacon, who has political ambitions (she is or may be running for some office?) and who wanted to create an incident to get publicity. She did so by going to Fox News, which is well-known as being anti-Red Cross.
You should encourage her to spend time here to get hardened to that leftist crap.