NEWBERG, Ore. — For 44 years, Aletha McKennon has walked into the same building at Mabel Rush Elementary School and done the same thing: handed a child an instrument, watched their eyes light up, and started a spark.
At the end of this school year, after 45 years total with Newberg-Dundee Public Schools, McKennon is retiring — the last chapter in a career that began in 1981 and touched, by her own estimation, multiple generations of Newberg families.
“I’ve taught the parents,” McKennon said. “I’ve taught maybe even a grandparent. There’s just so many that I’ve had the privilege of seeing their music start.”
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McKennon’s path to Mabel Rush was a short one geographically but a full one professionally. A graduate of George Fox University — then one of seven music education majors in her cohort — she was the only one hired into Newberg Schools. Her first year, in 1981, split her between Ewing Young Elementary and Newberg High School, where she served half-time as a choral teacher.
After one year, a position opened at Mabel Rush, and she has been there ever since.
“Somebody left and gave an opportunity for me to come into this spot,” she said. “Elementary has been my focus at Mabel Rush for 44 years.”
Music was never a choice for McKennon — it was the atmosphere she grew up in. Her family performed as the Zeller Family Singers, a traveling group that toured the United States for 12 years as artists for World Vision, the international humanitarian organization, performing to raise awareness and sponsorships for children in need.
“My parents were good musicians — piano soloists — and did that their entire lives,” she said. “I didn’t know any different.”
The musical thread runs deep in her family. Her brother is an opera singer who performs with Portland Opera and teaches at Portland State University. One sister is also an elementary music specialist; another went into drama.
That foundation shaped her philosophy in the classroom. McKennon describes herself not as a teacher who transmits technique but as a “spark starter” — someone whose job is to open a door.
“I enjoy starting, especially with elementary school children,” she said. “Starting their interest in music, being a spark starter — that’s my favorite thing.”
Over the decades, McKennon has built a curriculum at Mabel Rush that spans percussion, choir, ukulele, guitar, and woodwinds. She begins with rhythm and percussion to establish a foundation, moves into strings, and introduces woodwinds through ocarinas for younger students and recorders for older ones.
She made the shift from recorders to ocarinas, a tuber-shaped wind instrument, deliberately. The six-hole ocarina, she explained, is physically easier for younger children to play, with a more forgiving hand position for smaller fingers.
Which is a representation of her teaching philosophy; over the years, she’s drifted away from the rigid, technique-first model of her own training. She teaches guitar using a simplified three-string method so that students can play recognizable harmonies within their first lessons — not as a shortcut, she said, but as a way to show children immediately what music can feel like.
“I want more and more kids to see how fun music can be first,” she said. “These little people who are the garage guitarists — the playing around is also very good for learning, because it makes you enjoy what you’re doing, and it helps you to learn further.”
McKennon speaks about music’s role in child development with a specificity that comes from both the classroom and home. She said her husband and children are on the autism spectrum, and that experience has deepened her understanding of what music can do for different kinds of learners.
“For a musician with autism, music touches their soul and becomes a voice for them,” she said. “It becomes something that they really understand as a way to look at their environment.”
She sees music as one of the few subjects that connects to every other area of learning — mathematics in rhythm and structure, history, language development, and emotional expression.
“It is something that you can carry with you,” she said. “You don’t have to be a professional for your whole life, but you can. It’s one of those things you carry with you to your dying days.”
McKennon said retirement will not mean stillness. She has decades of original music that has never been published, a children’s book awaiting finalization, and years of musical curricula and productions she hopes to share with other educators.
She also does pyrography — wood-burning art — and describes a backlog of creative projects she has deferred throughout her teaching career.
For an artist with overflowing creative energy and passion, she said it was difficult for her to step away. But she said she saw a window of opportunity to open space for personal artistic pursuits, family time, and relaxation.
“I probably would be doing this job till I die,” she said, “except this has been a challenging year, and the district is going through some changes. I figured after 45 years, I could start doing some of those things on my bucket list.”
There will be a retirement reception for McKennon on Sunday, June 7 from 2 – 4 p.m. at Mabel Rush Elementary’s cafeteria to allow for current and former students, coworkers, and community members to celebrate McKennon’s contributions to the Newberg community.
