Mark Duker
The music programs of Indian Prairie School District 204, based in Naperville, Ill., seem to get noticed frequently by the Grammy Foundation. Neuqua Valley won the top honor last year as the National Grammy Signature School (see here, here, and here), and a band director at Waubonsie Valley is on the shortlist of 25 semifinalists for this year’s first Music Educator Award from the foundation.
The list of semifinalists was announced over a month ago, and although we noticed it, Mark Duker, the Fine Arts Department chair at Waubonsie, is the only semifinalist from Illinois, compared to California and New York, which each have four semifinalists on the list. Besides, this is just a list, selected from over 30,000 nominations, of teachers who might win the Music Educator Award. The 10 finalists will be announced in December.
But an excellent article by Marie Wilson in today’s Daily Herald, which provides a personal account of one thing that inspires young people to teach music in our schools and one way they then inspire other young people through their music, is enough to push our coverage forward. We congratulate, once again, the excellent music programs in District 204.
Mr Duker used to teach at one of the district’s middle schools, and two students who knew him there nominated him independently for the award. “I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to keep playing, but Mr Duker gave me the opportunity to be in the wind ensemble in seventh grade and it really sparked my interest in playing horn,” the paper quoted one of the two students, who is now a sophomore, as saying. “That helped me get into a lot of those things that I love now.”
