Photo courtesy of my friend Tarha Selvidge; this is how I remember Mrs. Clark.
I just want to say a few words about someone who was very important in my life.
On November 23rd of this year, my high school band director, Kristin Yvette (Page) Clark passed away. She had suffered a career-ending stroke nearly five years ago, and had been recovering ever since. She was ahead of her time in so many ways, and I genuinely believe that she was taken for granted in many ways. I was close to her at many points, having worked back at band camps at my high school while I was in college (she picked me up & drove me to work at camp, as well) and becoming colleagues with her in the same county in 2007. I write this, published on her birthday, in the hopes that folks will know what she meant to me and to so many others.
In the interim between her stroke and her death, her husband, Robert, took care of her completely. Robert was by her side every day, no matter where she was or what her condition was. One of the many things I took for granted about Mrs. Clark was the strength of her marriage. Robert Clark was our percussion instructor in high school — he & Kristin met at Bethune-Cookman University, apparently right at the start of their band camp. Throughout my high school career and beyond, they were always together. Robert was also always there for us as students, and always in the most supportive role he could possibly be.
And he was there for Kristin, taking care of every need of hers in the last years of her life. They even got to travel together in that last year.
As a teenager, I took for granted that I had a Black woman as a high school band director. There was a lot I did not know and did not understand about institutional racism at that age and about the reasons why the demographics of teachers (especially music teachers, and especially band directors) don’t often reflect the demographics of their students. Twenty years after I was in high school, some states just now have their first Black female high school band director. In some states, there are no female high school band directors, period. But Mrs. Clark held it down for us.
I’ve said many times that I did not come from a pedigreed music background. I grew up in a poor exurban town, and my high school had little to recommend it. In our band program, we did what we could. The difference that Mrs. Clark made is that she held on where others could not. And she fostered a community of belonging, of love, and she believed in us to the fullest degree. My previous director had shoved a bassoon in my hand at the end of my freshman year, and Mrs. Clark showed me how to actually work it, with the care and finesse that only a fellow double reed player could muster, the next year when she arrived. She had so much patience for all of us, regardless of the multiple hurdles that we faced. She was also a bonkers good music theory teacher, and what I learned in AP Music Theory my senior year carried me through college and all the way until graduate school.
I knew a fellow teacher who came to my room on a repair run after his first year of teaching, and told me that his school was in a similar situation to the school I taught at. He said, “I don’t know how you smile so much.” I sort of looked at him sideways, but later I realized that Mrs. Clark was a huge influence as to why I was always smiling. Why I held on where others could not. Her smile was her defining feature, and regardless of what obstacles she faced, her smile was always present. It was a light in dark places. She was always there for us, always there to listen to us, to drive us to rehearsals, to help us in any way possible.
I said to her over a number of years, “Deltona is not exactly a hotbed of ambition,” and it always made her laugh hysterically. But she inspired ambition in so many of us. She made us believe we could do more than maybe we realistically could, but it pushed us forward. She always built us up, never tearing us down. Lots of people cannot say that about their high school band directors. I owe so much of what I’ve become to her.
There is so much noise made about “teaching with love”, “leading with love”, and so much of these Social & Emotional Learning skills in education today. Even still, sometimes, by high school, students are left to their own devices when it comes to their Social & Emotional Learning. Mrs. Clark never left us on our own. She took care of us, she protected us, she pointed it out when we were doing the right things.
I was so lucky to have Kristin Clark as my teacher. I am a better teacher & a better person because she was such a huge influence on my life. I spent a lot of my life trying to forget where I came from, often taking for granted how lucky I was to have been there and studied under her tutelage.
At her funeral, her husband Robert projected a photo slideshow that included many photos of her in the hospital after her stroke. Even in times that must have been so heartbreaking & so painful, she flashed her brilliant smile. That spotlight smile continued all the way until the end.
She and Robert are a faith driven couple, and while I don’t share their faith, I spent a good amount of time at her funeral (between Baptist preachers) thinking about what happens next. There was such complete confidence in the room that she & Robert would see each other again in the future, in paradise. What I lack in my own personal faith, I feel in the faith that they will be reunited once again.
I’ve returned to this entry and edited it. I’ve thought a great deal about what to write about what she meant to me, about how lucky I feel to have known her, and about the tremendous shared loss that so many of my high school classmates felt upon news of her passing, but I know nothing I write can really do her justice. She was a woman ahead of her time, and she gave so much to so many of us that she cannot be forgotten. There is no possible way for my words to appropriately convey what she provided for us, but I can live up to her legacy in what I continue to do in my career & my own life.