ROBERT PIERCE
• Leader & Times
Renee Beesley came to work at Hugoton High School a decade ago, and at that time, the school had no show choir.
Starting such a choir was her primary goal before she became an educator.
“When I decided to teach, I said, ‘I will do that if you let me start a show choir,’” she said. “They allowed me to do that, and the first year, we just met on Sundays. It was so late in the year when I came on board. The schedule was already made.”
Since that time, Beesley has built the Hugoton Show Choir into a program recognized not only in Southwest Kansas and the Sunflower State itself, but nationwide.
Despite initially only meeting on Sundays, Beesley said her students were and continue to be incredible.
“On Sunday, I can’t require any of them to be at practice, but they’ve never missed a practice because they wanted to be a part of it,” she said.
Beesley said the Hugoton Show Choir has grown greatly, especially after conversations with USD 210 administration to include an hour a day of school time for choir.
“They were gracious and let me have them for sixth hour every day,” Beesley said.
The show choir’s nationwide exposure includes several trips to Branson, Mo., something that has taken much time and work to ready for performances.
“I take them every November to Branson to perform, and we’ve performed at the Branson Bell Showboat,” she said. “We’ve performed at Kings Castle, Clay Cooper, the Hughes Brothers, the Legends, Dolly Parton Stampede. I know I’m forgetting some, but we’ve performed at many, many of the shows there at Branson. That’s always a huge highlight for my show choir.”
Growing up in Hugoton and graduating from high school there, Beesley sang in the choir room she has taught in for the past 10 years, but she said teaching music was not something she was interested in as a career.
“I went to K-State and got my bachelor’s degree in animal science,” she said. “For a lot of people, it surprises them that I didn’t get my degree in music.”
Beesley, though, never actually worked in an agricultural industry.
“My husband and I both graduated from K-State,” she said. “We came straight back here, and I never pursued a job. I was a stay-at-home mom the whole time. It wasn’t really a shift for me because I didn’t ever had that job in the ag industry to begin with.”
Returning to Hugoton, Beesley was a stay-at-home mom for years, and it was when her middle daughter, Sydney, was a freshman at HHS was freshman when she got a call from USD 210 asking if she would be the music teacher.
“I laughed at them at first. I said, ‘You do know my degree’s in ag?’” she said. “They said, ‘Yeah we know, but you’ve done music.’ I did K-State Singers while I was at K-State, which is an audition group. It was six guys, six girls. We had a piano player, a bass guitar and a drummer, and we traveled all over the United States. It was more like the show choir I do here. I did have knowledge of music from doing that. I told her, ‘Let me think about it a little bit.’”
Many music programs in Western Kansas are declining due to lack of teachers, and this is a large part of what drove Beesley to accept the Hugoton job.
“I said, ‘I’ll try it for one year,’ and here I am almost a decade later still teaching,” she said. “Sometimes, music is not quite supported enough in the schools, and I see a lot of programs falling through the cracks where they don’t have teachers. Definitely, they don’t have accompanyists.”
Beesley said many people do not understand the importance of music to students.
“I’ve got some of my straight A students who say, ‘Renee, this is the highlight of our day,” she said. “‘When we’re sitting in class all day, we know show choir’s coming. We know we get to go to the stage, and we get to perform and dance and sing and do what we love to do.’ Most of them will tell you that’s the highlight of their day. Music is very important, and I sometimes think we don’t understand the importance of the mental health it helps kids with as well. There’s a lot of mental health issues, but there’s something about music and when you put that with kids with mental health. It lifts their spirits.”
Like most teachers, Beesley said she enjoys working with kids, and this is much of what she will miss, as the 2024-25 school year will be her last at HHS.
In addition to Branson, the Hugoton Show Choir was invited to sing at Carnegie Hall in New York City, which Beesley called one of the major highlights of her career.
“We had five pieces we had to work on all semester,” she said. “One of them in particular was very, very tough. It took us all semester to learn it. I tell the kids every day, ‘We’re going to get this,’ and every day, I’d think, ‘We’re not going to get this.’ Once we got to New York City, they knew the song better than anybody. I was really proud of them. It was a huge thing to be invited to sing for that.”
Beesley herself was invited to be a guest clinician at Oklahoma Panhandle State University’s Grasslands Music Festival.
“That was fun, and I was honored they asked me to do that,” she said.
A definite highlight, though, for Beesley has been achieving perfect scores at state music competitions.
“One of them was the ‘Nearer My God to Thee,’” she said. “It was a tough college level song, and they got a perfect score at state music. We worked really hard on that.”
Beesley said all of her students want to do well, and that has shown in the success the show choir has had.
“They want to set goals and achieve goals, and I love that,” she said. “I love to see that progression. Thinking about my seniors, it’s going to be hard because I’ve seen them every single day for six years. After I retire, that’s not going to be anymore. When you see somebody every single day for six years, it is fun to watch those changes and that progression.”
Beesley said one parent told her how different her son is when he comes home from show choir, and this emphasizes the importance of the program.
“I hate to see that some music programs are falling through the cracks because it is so important,” she said. “I would like us to keep an emphasis on the music programs because of what it does for the kids.”
Beesley, however, brought much more than music to her students in the form of community service.
“Each year, we would do an Angel Tree at Christmas time for kids or families who are in need,” she said. “With the money the kids had raised in show choir, we would go to Liberal and Walmart. We’d usually pick about four names off the angel tree. We would go and purchase gifts for those kids, and I would bring them back here. The kids would wrap them. They would deliver them. It was a way to give back to the community.”
That was just some of the work Beesley’s students did in Hugoton.
“They voted to give money on several occasions for fundraiser dinners for people in Hugoton who were in need,” she said. “They would donate some money out of our funds for that.”
Though the Hugoton Show Choir performed at many venues, they never asked for payment for singing.
“Seaboard Energy had their big ribbon cutting a couple years ago, and they asked us to be the entertainment,” Beesley said. “We would entertain for a lot of stuff like that just as service. When they said, ‘What do you charge?’ I said ‘We will never charge you anything.’ Not just the Hugoton community, but the surrounding communities have been so good to the Hugoton Show Choir. We always wanted to give back.”
Still, the choir would get donations for their time anyway.
“Every single time we did that, we would have people writing us checks,” Beesley said.
In her classroom, Beesley has a letter from a donor from as far away as Houston.
“He was out at Seaboard,” she said. “I didn’t know the guy. When it was over, a couple weeks later, I got a letter in the mail saying he had been out there from Houston, and he said, ‘I want to donate to you guys. You guys did a phenomenal job, and I want to donate.’ I told him, ‘You don’t have to do that.’ In the next couple weeks, we received a $1,000 check.”
Beesley said part of her education was the idea of giving back to the community, and she even taught her students to write “thank you” notes for donations and other acts of kindness.
Beesley said some of the challenges of her job included having students in both her class and other extracurricular activities.
“Sometimes, it got a little tricky trying to convince administration we’re going to be gone again or even compete with sports,” she said. “There’s a challenge there sometimes when the kids are musicians, but they’re athletes too. They feel pulled in both directions, especially in a small school. The numbers are small, and a lot of the kids are doing a lot of things. In a bigger school, you might have music kids only. In my show choir, I’ve kids who are doing power lifting. They’re doing musicals. They’re doing football, basketball, golf, all of it. It’s a challenge to try to work around their schedules and schedule our performances, but it always worked out, and the kids always showed up because they loved it.”
Beesley said seeing students grasp a concept after periods of struggle with it is one of the most rewarding parts of her job as is seeing the growth in confidence from their freshman year to their senior year.
“It is incredible how much they change with their confidence, maturity and talents,” she said.
With her youngest daughter graduating this year, Beesley felt it was time to leave the teaching ranks.
“When I’m done, she’s done,” she said. “My other daughter has a new baby. I’m a grandma for the first time. I get to spend a little more time being grandma. My parents are getting older, so I definitely want to be a part of helping out with them wherever they need.”
Beesley will continue to be involved as the praise and worship leader at Hugoton’s First Christian Church and the youth leader at HHS, leaving her with still plenty to do.
“I’m still going to be busy doing a lot of other stuff, just not at Hugoton High School,” she said.
As she looked back on a decade of teaching, Beesley said her students absolutely reached the standards she set for them.
“I never set the goals too low,” she said. “In fact, there were some times I thought maybe the goals were set a little too high myself, but it always amazed me that no matter what I ask of the kids, they reached it.”
Beesley said her students have been amazing and are capable of anything.
“If you believe in them, if you love on them, they will give you everything they’ve gone,” she said.
Her students, Beesley said, are what she will miss most about her job.
“I tell them they’re the reason I color my hair, but they’re going to be the reason I miss it the most,” she said. “They help keep you young and energetic.”
Beesley, however, said there is little she will not miss about working at Hugoton High.
“Everything’s been good,” she said. “I’ve had a wonderful accompanist, Angela Heger. She has been phenomenal, and she is a big part of my success here. It’s been a fun group we’ve put together here. It’s fun to watch them grow and learn and not just music and stage, but life lessons. It’s been a really fun experience for me.”
The school year at HHS is scheduled to end May 13, and Beesley said hearing the bell ring for the last time that day will be difficult.
“I think the last time I turn my light switch off, it’ll be hard, but we’ve had a good run,” she said. “It’ll be sad, but it’ll be good.”
