Chuck Hess thinks coming to work is a blessing.
Hess, who is the new music director at St. Joseph-Ogden High School, said the students he teaches in the SJO Marching Band are one of the best parts of the job.
“They are some of the finest, hardest working, most dedicated young people I have had the pleasure of working with,” he said. “They, along with my other music students, make coming to work every day a true blessing.”
The SJO music program has had a lot of turn over the in past few years, with the last music director teaching at SJO for only a year. Hess said that can usually be detrimental to the morale of the students, but that hasn’t been the case at SJO.
“The most surprising thing to me has been how much the students want to not only participate but grow and excel in their abilities as performers,” he said.
Hess has taught music for 18 years. The first four years of his career were spent as a band director in the Georgetown-Ridge Farm schools and then the rest of his teaching tenure was in the Danville schools.
At Danville Hess started as the band director then shifted to elementary music as he began pursuing studies to become a pastor in the Church of the Nazarene.
Hess was ordained in 2010 and had been serving at Southside Church of the Nazarene in Tilton as their youth pastor for the past four years.
“My return to teaching was due to declining financial resources in the church to support my position,” Hess said.
Hess said the SJO position became open almost immediately after he found out his position at the church was going to become unpaid.
“It was close enough that I could easily commute from Danville and I didn’t have to deal with the possibility of moving my family,” he said.
Hess said he loves teaching and loves helping students accomplish something that they had no idea they could accomplish together.
Hess said he considers the marching band and the music department a family and has several long-term goals for the program.
“I would love to see us continue to grow closer as performers, grow through more students being involved in the program, and grow as individual performers,” he said.
