SCHWENT RETIRING, BUT ONLY FROM TEACHING

Pat Schwent was good at two things in high school. Sports and music. She came from a musical family. From age 14 on she played in a band. Music won out in college. She graduated with a degree in music and began teaching. The students taught her everything she knows about teaching in the first five years of teaching. She loves teaching kids what she knows and also enjoys watching.

For Schwent, who will retire at the end of the school year, continuing the "good, solid teaching" in music is important. There is a certain integrity in teaching music that she said will not be compromised. Jackson's music program in grades 7-12, teaches the solid basics of music, how to play and how to listen.

Schwent's expectations are high, she knows, but Jackson offers the fundamentals so students can become connoisseurs of music, excel to their highest potential musically and be ready to take private lessons from the masters, if that is their serious intention.

Classes are broken down properly so that students are able to excel. The seventh and eighth-grade students are taught by the instruments they play. The freshman band and the high school band play all together.

"Once you get older, you realize what you don't know," Schwent said of her retirement plans.

Schwent has spent 30 years giving to her students, enabling them to live up to their musical potential. Now she wants to focus on her saxophone, to learn to improvise better than she can now. She is still very interested in music and has been taking jazz improvisation lessons on saxophone from a well-known jazz tenor saxophonist in St. Louis, Paul DeMaranis.

Schwent also plans to open a studio for private lessons, starting this summer in her home.

She'll also continue to play professionally, stay physically fit and spend more time with her husband.

There are former students who've aspired to great heights: Kevin Nitsch went onto Julliard, Brandon Suedekum will always be grateful for his jazz education and will soon become a specialist in ophthalmology, Jamie Brothers earned a doctorate in trombone, music performance, and Randy Smith, teaches at Truman State University. Smith studied with Eugene Rousseau, the top saxophonist in the world.

The advice Schwent would like to leave her students with is this: "Find something you can do well, pursue it aggressively; if it doesn't work out, have a plan B (back up) ready. In life you will win a few, and lose a lot."

There will be two new band directors to fill Schwent's position: Paul Fliege a concert clarinetist, who has taught in Macon, Mo., for three years and who has the same principles and philosophies as Schwent, and former Jackson student, Chris Crawford, a percussionist teacher.