• Jody Henderson inspires with music |
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Jody Henderson inspires with music “Jody Henderson is the soul of Sisters High School — and that’s the truth.” So says Sisters High School Principal Bob Macauley of the band director who has inspired hundreds of students to pursue a lifelong passion for music. Henderson’s students have won festival championships and several have gone on to prestigious music schools, including his son Jared, a phenomenal bass player who is attending Berklee College of Music. For Henderson, results like these means he has succeeded in his goal as a music educator. “I want to make kids feel the same way about music as somebody made me feel about music,” he says. “I want to make kids feel about themselves the way someone made me feel about myself through music.” Inspired by Louis Armstrong and “an awesome middle school band teacher,” Henderson decided in the fifth grade that he wanted to become a professional trumpet player. That wasn’t exactly what was expected from the son of a union pipe fitter and a gospel-blues-piano-playing mother in Eagle Point, Oregon, but the dream was nurtured through high school by a “young, hip high school band director” named Steve Thickett. Thickett exposed the young musician to a broader world, taking him to concerts and festivals where he could hear and play with top-flight musicians. The exposure was both inspiring and intimidating. “I was just clueless,” Henderson said. “I had no idea how much work (becoming a professional trumpet player) would take or how much of a head start other kids had on me.” Reality came crashing in after high school, and Henderson set aside dreams of a career in music to take a well-paid job as a pipe fitter, traveling from job to job. But he never lost his love for music. He dreamed of teaching kids, though that seemed far away. It was his wife Sarina who gave Jody the encouragement and support he needed to follow his bliss. She urged him to go to college and pursue a new career in music education. “Meeting Sarina and having her encourage me to do that really changed my life,” Henderson recalls. It didn’t change overnight. It took 11 slow, agonizing years for Henderson to finish school at Southern Oregon State College while continuing to work to support his family. That decade of effort gives Henderson one of his most powerful teaching tools. “One of my biggest bragging rights with my students is that I stuck with it,” he said. Henderson interviewed for a job at Sisters High School in 1996. “I knew when I first walked through the door that this is a special place,” he says. “It’s not the usual small town.” A close-knit community with a strong commitment to the arts and to education, Henderson found Sisters to be the right place to work and the right place to raise his own children, Jared, Blake and Jayme. Henderson’s work load in the small Sisters School District was huge — he was covering both band and choir. Henderson moved to the larger Mountain View High School in Bend where he could focus solely on teaching instrumental music, but he returned to Sisters a year later, having missed the small school. He’s been here ever since, taking a small but rich talent pool and molding bands and ensembles that compete successfully in adjudicated performances across the Northwest and in California. “He’s the best coach in the district,” says Principal Macauley. “And he may be the best person I know.” Henderson believes that the tight-knit school community maximizes students’ effort and achievement. “I think there’s a tremendous transfer of learning about success from football field to basketball courts to classrooms to rehearsal spaces and performance stages,” he says. He notes that his son Jared learned discipline and perseverance through Sisters’ outdoor education program and running track and cross country — qualities that stood him in good stead as he developed into an award-winning jazz bassist. While many of Henderson’s students have gone on to significant achievement, Henderson emphasizes that success in music, art, sports or any other passion is for everyone and should last a lifetime. “I want kids to find out what’s important to them and to know that if it’s important to them at 18 when they walk out the school doors, it’s going to be important to them their whole lives,” he says. “If something is important when you’re 16, it’s important when you’re 45 and you should definitely make time for that in your life.” Return to Extraordinary Sisters.
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