A beloved and celebrated teacher is retiring from Hazen High School after 17 years there as a music teacher.
A retirement party for Ernest Hibbard will be held 6 p.m., Thursday at the Renton Pavilion Event Center downtown, 233 Burnett Ave. S. The band director announced earlier this year that he had been diagnosed with ALS, or more commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease.
Friends, family and former students are to come together Thursday and pay tribute to the man who has touched so many lives.
“Of the leaders I’ve experienced in my life, Mr. Hibbard is of a rare breed,” said Buddy Waddington, a former student. “Although being a music teacher literally puts you in the middle of a classroom with a wand to direct and control students, he never directed us through a piece of music; he empowered us to produce it.”
Several former students, teachers, parents and Hibbard’s family and friends organized the get together that will feature a slideshow, remembrances, performances from former students and food. An estimated 200 people are expected to attend.
Hibbard has been a teacher in the Renton School district for 20 years, with three years spent at Renton High School before going to Hazen.When he was 15, he started playing in Hawai’i, including a stint with the Honolulu Symphony. He earned his music degree from the University of Washington and went on to play with a lot of people in the Seattle area. Hibbard performed in USO tours at U.S. and NATO bases in Turkey, Greece, Italy and Spain.
Hibbard has tried to impart to his students the idea that, “Good musicians work on their weaknesses, weak musicians just focus on their strengths,” he wrote in an email.
“Music is just ink on a page until you infuse it with an emotional element,” Hibbard said. “You have to put yourself out there if you’re going to connect with an audience.”
The start of the school year is always an exciting time for him, when the ninth graders come in not knowing what is going to happen, needing to be reassured and older students with a sense of anticipation.
“But my favorite time of the year was probably toward March when we would go to contests,” Hibbard said. “We were done playing at sports events for the year and the bands would really pull together to make sure everything was as good as they could make it.”
This year, Hibbard was named Outstanding Music Educator for the region by the Washington Music Educator’s Association. He has most recently been playing with a group of musicians in the MusicWorks Jazz Orchestra, and calls his work challenging.Hibbard has enjoyed playing recently at jazz clubs in Seattle, like Tula’s in downtown.
“I think music is one of the things that makes us human,” Hibbard said. “It requires different parts of your brain to work together in a way that’s different from any other activity. It teaches the kind of thinking that is responsible for many great innovations in our history, and skills that we will need as the world continues to change around us.”
The celebration is open to the public.
