Photo by Erin Nelson.
Deana Rizzo, former band director at Chelsea Middle School, reacts to a gift from Justin Watkins during Rizzo’s retirement party at The Church at Chelsea in Westover. Rizzo retired at the end of the 2022-23 school year after 30 years of teaching.
Deana Rizzo said she doesn’t remember it, but according to her mom, when she was little she used to stand on a footstool and conduct the band on “The Lawrence Welk Show.”
She was one in a long line of music lovers.
“My family is very musical; everybody grew up taking piano lessons,” Rizzo said. “My grandfather used to sit and play piano when I went to visit them.”
So she started taking piano lessons too, and as the years went by, she found herself playing flute in the Chelsea Middle School band.
“I loved it. I was super passionate about it,” Rizzo said.
During her junior year of high school, she became drum major, and that gave her a taste of what leading the band could be like, more so than her “Lawrence Welk” days.
“The role held a lot of responsibility,” she said.
The band director, Dane Lawley, leaned on the student leaders a lot because there was no assistant director, Rizzo said.
And along the way, the thought occurred to her: “This is really fun.”
She said from there, she never considered another path for her life. She got a degree in music education from Troy University, and 30 years later she’s retiring from her work at Chelsea Middle School.
“I just can’t imagine having been anywhere else,” Rizzo said.
She said God put all the pieces together for her to be able to start her career in her hometown after she graduated from college. In 1993, because of her background in church choir and piano, she was offered a position teaching general music in the mornings at Calera Elementary School and teaching choir in the afternoons at Chelsea Middle School.
She took it and spent those years driving back and forth between the two schools while working on her master’s degree.
At that time, Lawley was also driving back and forth between Chelsea’s middle and high schools directing the bands.
“Three years later, he got enough students in his program at the high school to start there full time, and I became middle school band director,” Rizzo said.
And she’s loved every minute of it, she said. “As a band director, you get to have your students for more than just one year, so you really develop a relationship and a rapport and then get to see them grow and continue on that journey in high school.”
Rizzo said she also loved having her sons — now 25 and 22 — in the band “by their own choosing.”
“Having them there and getting to have that experience with them and their friends was really special,” she said.
Rizzo said she hasn’t taken it lightly that parents have entrusted their children to her.
“I’ve been super privileged to have a small part in their lives,” she said. “I’ve tried to be mindful of continuous learning and teach them to be better people through the study of music.”
She’s gotten to see many of them go on to play in college bands or major in music, and before she retired, she had begun to teach the first wave of children of previous students.
Cynthia Cruce, principal of Chelsea Middle School, said Rizzo has been “very much a special part of this school.”
“She’s well loved, and she built really good relationships with people,” Cruce said, noting that Rizzo has done a great job retaining students in the band. “The kids would start with her and most of the time they would continue, because she made it where they would want to be a part.”
Cruce said Rizzo developed a widely respected band program, but even more than that, she impacted hundreds of students each year.
“She’s been an influence not just in the band community, but in the community of Chelsea for such a long time,” Cruce said.
