Wichita principal, teachers release music video intended to help comfort Class of 2020
Matt Creasman and Toby Tyner still remember what it was like to be high school seniors.
So in addition to missing their students at Northeast Magnet High School, who without knowing it had their last day of school the Friday before spring break, the two have also been thinking about how hard it must be on their seniors.
“There’s a real lack of closure,” Tyner said. “It’s not just seniors. Every year there’s that moment of closure and well-wishing and ‘Goodbye, see you next time.’ And many of the students have expressed to me that if they’d known that day was their last day of school, they would have approached it very differently.”
Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly last month ordered schools closed across the state due to the novel coronavirus pandemic.
Seniors are now missing things they can’t ever make up — from sports seasons to proms to theater productions to academic contests — and it has to hurt.
A week ago, the two decided to reach out to their students through music, a shared passion of Creasman, the principal of Northeast Magnet, and Tyner, a history teacher there.
They spent the past week writing, recording and producing a video for an original song called “Rise” as a tribute to class of 2020 seniors across USD 259, and the school district released it Monday evening via social media. The pair had help from singer Jon Albers, also a history teacher at Northeast Magnet, and from Aidan Creasman, Matt Creasman’s son and a sophomore at Northeast, who recorded and mixed the track.
Travis Heying of The Wichita Eagle, who plays drums with the musicians on the weekends, produced the video.
“Obviously, it’s graduation we’re thinking about,” Creasman said. “But it’s also those things where the window closes and you don’t ever have that opportunity again. It’s kind of heartbreaking to think about it.
“We can’t put our arms around kids to say, ‘It’ll be okay’ because we can’t even see them. They’re not here. So this gave us an opportunity to let them know we care about them.”
Principal Creasman and teachers Tyner and Albers are all musicians who get together on weekends to play in Creasman’s basement. They’ve been doing it for a couple of years and have a rotating cast of musicians, including Heying, friend Chris Kux, and Chad Cushenbery, the assistant principal at Robinson Middle School.
A version of the group that included both Matt and Aidan Creasman plus Albers, Tyner, Heying and another Northeast student, made its public debut at a Northeast talent show called Griffins Got Talent earlier this year. They called themselves The Griffins and performed a cover of “Runaway Train” by Soul Asylum.
Tyner called Creasman last week with the idea to cover a song as a tribute to the seniors. Creasman, in turn, suggested they just pen their own song. He sent Tyner, an experienced songwriter and member of the Newton band The Ne’er-do-wells, a chord progression he’d been working out on his electric guitar and some ideas for lyrics.
“When you teach, one of the important things you have to do is remember what it was like to be the age of the kids you are teaching, otherwise you’ll be completely out of touch,” Tyner said. “And I was thinking of the seniors missing these rite of passage they’ve been looking froward to for literally years.”
Tyner took it from there and wrote the rest of the song, which includes uplifting lyrics about looking for light when things don’t turn out as expected. It’s a mostly acoustic song, with Tyner on lead vocals and guitar, Creasman on electric guitar and Albers on backup vocals.
Creasman said he was thinking about one student who is missing his senior baseball season, and it was set to be his best one. He also thought of a female student planning to direct a play and some senior runners who were looking at possible state championships.
“I was just thinking about it, and nobody has ever had to give up anything like that,” he said. “I can’t think of another senior class that’s ever had to do that.”
Creasman reached out to all his high school principal colleagues and asked them to send over photos of themselves holding signs with messages to seniors that could be included in the video. All of them did, and so did Superintendent Alicia Thompson and Assistant Superintendent Gil Alvarez.
The video also includes shots of empty school hallways, empty classrooms and messages posted on high school building signs.
At a school board meeting on Monday, Thompson called it “an awesome, awesome tune” and encouraged people to watch the video online. As of Tuesday afternoon, the video had been shared more than 700 times on Facebook and been viewed more than 29,000.
Contributing: Denise Neil of The Eagle
This story was originally published April 21, 2020 at 3:28 PM.
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