Teacher of the Year helps kids hit the high notes

Katie Hebner coaches her first-period choir students at Alki Middle School for a December concert. Hebner is Educational Service District 112’s Teacher of the Year. (Zachary Kaufman/The Columbian)

Middle school teacher Katie Hebner has a touch of horse whisperer to her. When she teaches, she doesn’t stop moving, won’t stop encouraging or smiling as she leads her first period choir class through song.

The students’ eyes are fixed on their teacher, a chic, slim woman who was recently named Educational Service District 112’s teacher of the year. What she’s doing, though, to get their respect, is a mystery. She doesn’t make grand gestures or crack corny jokes, nor does she raise her voice, unless it’s to demonstrate a C note.

Hebner doesn’t call it magic, though. She calls it basic: respect the students and treat every day like a new one.

“High risk, high responsibility,” she tells her students at Thomas Jefferson Middle School and Alki Middle School. “Make your mistakes good and loud so that we can correct them.”

In a letter recommending Hebner as teacher of the year, Janelle Harriman, an eighth-grader last year, wrote: “I know there are many students who come into choir class very shy, I was one of them. … My favorite thing that she tells all of her students is, ‘It’s OK to make mistakes and if you do, SING THEM STRONG.’”

Hebner didn’t win the statewide teacher of the year award last week, but that hardly mattered. She was surrounded by her two grown sons and her teaching partner and best friend Lisa Perigo, who has known Hebner since the mid-1970s, when they were freshmen at Battle Ground High School.

“She was the shyest person ever,” Perigo said. “If anyone looked at her, she’d turn bright red.”

She was shy because she was poor and a new student at Battle Ground High. So she turned to choir — “my one outlet where I could explode” — where she was mentored by the popular choir director, Orrell Peru.

Peru helped bring Hebner out of her shell, and he gave her a year of free singing lessons to prepare her for the school’s elite choir. Those lessons helped her find her voice and a greater sense of confidence.

“To this day, when I hear Katie sing, I cry,” Perigo said, her eyes misting over. “I can’t listen to her without crying. She can sing Puccini. We sang in Italian. We sang arias. She could hit a high C with crystal clarity.”

Peru also taught Hebner how to be a teacher, how to stay positive and not allow students to critique each other. Throughout class, Hebner compliments her students as Peru did decades ago, because she believes mistakes will right themselves on their own: “Shake it out, bend your knees, how are you doing? Where are your toes? Your feet? Stand tall. Sing to me, not your feet.”

The seventh- and eighth-grade girls in her Alki choir class perk up, lining their flip-flops and flats along the bleachers, pulling on hooded sweatshirts.

“Drop the jaw,” Hebner said, demonstrating with an exaggerated expression. “Make sure the ‘mmm’ tickles so that you have that space behind your teeth.”

They start to sing, and it’s surprisingly melodic as Hebner nods and smiles, somehow, magically, nudging them into pitch-perfect shape.