Choir kids con teacher into a Grammy nomination — now she’s a contender

Alison Ellis’ choir students pulled a fast one on her, and now she’s up for a Grammy.

The Peninsula High School choir teacher didn’t even know she’s been nominated by her own students until she was notified that she was among 216 teachers named quarter-finalists for the prestigious music award.

“They knew I would never fill out the paperwork myself, so they pretended to be interviewing me for the school newspaper,” Ellis said.

Ellis, who has led Seahawk choirs for 10 years, downplayed the nomination, saying she didn’t expect to advance farther. Still, she admitted, she was “stunned” at the honor, and amused at the sly way her students pulled it off.

The Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences began honoring music educators in 2014, saying it wanted to “bring attention to the excellent and impactful work being done by thousands of music teachers across the U.S.”

The 2020 winner was Micky Smith, Jr., a saxophonist and director of bands at Maplewood Middle School in Sulphur, Louisiana.

The winning teacher receives a $10,000 honorarium and a trip to the Grammy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles in early 2021. Ten semifinalists will be announced later this year.

Nerds and jocks

Present and former students rave about Ellis, whom they say has created a special, inclusive culture in her choirs.

“Ms. Ellis is just soooo wonderful,” crooned Madeline LeFever, a 2019 alto. “She made it so much fun. She makes choir cool. he cares about her students so much — she gets us.”

Ellis has made the choir a snapshot of the school, scooping up people from the hallways and shamelessly recruiting from the sports teams, said LeFever, who is now a sophomore at Western Washington University.

“I lot of people think of choir as nerdy,” she said. “But we have football players in choir. We have dancers. We have artists. We have so many people whose eyes Ms. Ellis has opened to the arts. She doesn’t push it down their throats — she allows them to learn to love it independently.”

Gabe Fobes, a 2018 graduate who sang baritone and tenor, said choir pulled him through a tough period of his adolescence.

“I had kind of a rough patch in family and life,” he said. “Ms. Ellis kind of became a second mom, and choir was like a family. It was a home and a safe environment for all of us.”

Fobes is now at Pacific Lutheran University studying to be a music educator — a direction in life he credits to Ellis.

“She had a very positive influence on my life,” he said. “She’s truly a wonderful human being.”

Grief and beauty

Though unexpected, the honor comes at a good time, Ellis said.

“It has been a challenging time, dealing with the coronavirus and trying to teach online,” she said.

“It has been a time of real grief and real beauty. Grief because we don’t get to do the things we love a lot, and beauty because we’re learning to build a different kind of community online.”

Ellis, 45, came to Peninsula from Memphis, Tenn., where she earned a master’s degree in music and sang in regional operas for several years. She came to take a “part-time job” teaching 17 choir students, a gig she thought wouldn’t last long.

“I just fell in love with it,” she said. “The music, the kids, the school, everything. It was just the right fit at the right time.”

Today she has about 160 members in several choirs, and they make up a tight community.

“That’s one of the powerful things about choir, especially at Peninsula,” she said. “We’ve build a really diverse community, with kids from every corner of the school — the basketball players, the chess club kids, the anime kids.”

She’s proud of the fact that, for the last several years, the choir has always included several of the school’s top athletes.

And the classes she teaches are challenging, her kids say — heavy on music theory and performance practice, with high expectations.

Super weird time

Since the coronavirus shutdown began in March, the choir has spent online time focusing on things they wouldn’t usually have time for — making recordings, dipping more deeply into music theory, studying music from other cultures. Two members qualified for a national honor choir, and several participated in a “virtual choir” organized by the composer Eric Whitacre.

“Teaching is harder, because you have to spend more time preparing to do things online than actually doing things with kids,” she said. Singing is nearly impossible, she said, because while a whole choir can get together on Zoom, they can only hear each other one at a time.

“We’ve had a few practice sessions that were just super weird and awkward,” she said, laughing.

“On the other hand, there have been some wonderful moments working one-on-one with beautiful kids, and that’s made it all worthwhile.”

This story was originally published September 16, 2020 at 10:53 AM.