Stefani earns state award for music education

A music teacher in Moscow has been named the state of Idaho’s best.

McDonald Elementary School’s Kathy Stefani earned the 2021-22 Idaho Music Educator of the Year award Feb. 5 during the Idaho Music Educators Association’s four-day conference in Nampa.

Stefani is a Moscow native who graduated from Moscow High School and received her bachelor’s degree in music education from the University of Idaho. She is in her 30th year of teaching music, the last six at McDonald, where she’s known for her daily enthusiasm and ability to inspire her students.

Stefani, a past president of the Idaho Music Educators Association, also earned an Award of Excellence from the group in 2020, and later that year was recognized with an Idaho Governor’s Award in the Arts.

The Idaho Music Educators Association is a group of about 350 music teachers from across the state, the majority of those working in the K-12 setting.

Called “magical” by one of her co-workers in a 2020 Daily News feature story, Stefani has guided students to success in competitions big and small, and her recent dedication to mentoring future teachers and retaining existing ones was key in helping Stefani win her award this month.

“Kathy takes mentoring upcoming and new teachers very seriously,” McDonald Principal Kim Mikolajczyk wrote in an email. “When she mentors student teachers, she is all business and makes sure they are ready to run a music program in a school.”

It was Stefani who, during the early days of Moscow school closures because of the COVID-19 pandemic, helped organize the community “bear hunt” in Moscow, which encouraged residents to put stuffed bears in their windows and yards for families to spot as they walked their neighborhood.

Mikolajczyk recently had the chance to substitute teach in Stefani’s classroom.

“As students arrived at class I was humbled by their excitement as they entered the classroom in anticipation of what Kathy had in store for them that day,” Mikolajczyk wrote.

While the past few years have been especially difficult for all students and instructors, Stefani said the pandemic has been especially tough on the state’s music programs. She said many new teachers — even during their student-teaching semesters in college — have not experienced regular, extended face-to-face teaching as they might normally have.

Many schools have seen the number of students participating in music programs drop as well, Stefani said, indicating the pandemic has “ravaged” music ensembles in schools across the state.

Stefani, who said she is still several years from retirement, indicated her goal for the near future is to continue to recruit music teachers to the profession, regrow programs and “fan the flames of what we have left.”