What do you do when it's your jazz band giving you the blues?.....

There's a truth about high school jazz bands that took me years to recognize:  They're cliques.  All of the other performing groups in the music program are communities, with people constantly coming and going, and there's always room for new students.  But jazz bands?  They're one on a part.  Once you fill up the slots, you *don't* take more players, because jazz groups are supposed to operate on a distilled sound.  Too much of any one thing and you lose the clarity.  Once you lose clarity, you might as well stop pretending that you can teach music.  But see, the problem is that once you get a half-way decent kid in the group, they can lock a position up for years.  When you have a number of people who have been doing that for half of their high school careers (or more) they can get pretty tight with each other.  Ordinarily that's a good thing.  Except when it's not.
My jazz group seems to teeter on the edge of mutiny every now and then.  (I feel a 'now' creeping up on me again.)  It usually happens when the members get comfortable and complacent, and start to resent being pushed to do basic things like practice, show up on time or wear the right clothes to gigs.  In a small program like mine, some of them feel secure in the knowledge that they're the best (instrument) player in the school, if not the only (instrument) player in the school.  If there was a line of kids willing to give each member some competition on (instrument) things would be different.  Alas, such a plethora of players to chose from exists only in my dreams.
A lot of that is garden variety high school student attitude - which is something I am not unfamiliar with.  Truth be told, I even have a considerable tolerance for it.  But what gets under my skin is the way some of them don't seem to care an inch beyond their clique.  They want to use the music room as their hang out spot, but they don't want to help me take care of it.  They don't really feel an urgency to maintain a sense of professionalism, during the rehearsals or on gigs.  They want to sound amazing, but they don't want to work for it.  Oh... and I'm a big dolt who doesn't know what I'm talking about half the time.  Never mind that the only reason they sound polished is because I nag the shit out of them - which I hate doing.
Most of the problem is graduating this year.  Maybe I should just relax and spoon feed them everything and let them believe that it's all them.  Here's hoping that the next generation will be better.