Dixon High School’s new choir gives all singers opportunity to lift up their voices

Dixon High School’s choir and life skills classes joined forces early in the 2025 spring semester to create a new ensemble known as Voices United.

The life skills class provides students with disabilities the resources they need to be successful. The class runs a student business and student peers rotate in the classroom each hour to work with the class, life skills teacher Natalie Gordon said.

One of those peers is DHS senior Grace Shoemaker-Fenwick, who began spending a lot of time helping out in the life skills room after deciding that she wants to have a career in special education. As a choir student as well, she was instrumental in creating the Voices United ensemble, choir teacher Erin Rogers said.

“She does so much. It’s really a collaboration between the three of us,” Rogers said. “She engages with the students so well and she knows them really well.”

During a typical school day, most life skills students spend the majority of their time in that one classroom. Some of them will go to certain classes that they have an opportunity to be successful at, “but that’s home base for them,” Rogers said.

As Voices United was created, the choir room became “a second space that gets to be theirs within the building,” and they’re “getting to know students outside of the ones that they are with the entire day,” Rogers said.

“Some of them are holding guitars and just strumming, but the practice of strumming is still engaging with the music on an instrument, even though they’re not playing chords. They’re still able to engage with it,” she said.

It all got started about two years ago when one life skills student, who is blind and uses a wheelchair, began joining the students in the choir room during their practices. When the student first started coming, he would just listen, but eventually, he got to the point where he was comfortable enough to start singing along with the group, Rogers said.

“He was kind of like the initiation of, we should find something where we can bring these two groups together,” Rogers said.

Another life skills student also expressed an interest in music after finding a sheet of music and asking Shoemaker-Fenwick if she could teach them how to read it, Shoemaker-Fenwick said.

“I just thought it was the sweetest thing,” and that it would be really cool to do some kind of collaboration, Shoemaker-Fenwick said.

From there, the group began holding practice on Thursdays and Fridays during the school-wide study hall known as extended learning time and Shoemaker-Fenwick became the designated student helper, Rogers said.

“They have a lot of fun and they are a very smiley group,” Rogers said.

Within the past couple of months, the students have become more comfortable, and “their ability to keep a steady beat has improved a lot,” she said. “At the beginning, they weren’t really singing, but as we were going now, they sing really loudly and I can hear them.”

Rogers attributed the life skills students’ growing confidence to their positive relationship with Shoemaker-Fenwick.

“They all adore her ... She dances with them, plays instruments ... Grace [Shoemaker-Fenwick] has this natural ability to engage with others with all different levels of ability,” which is something that a lot of students at that age don’t understand how to do, Rogers said.

For example, Rogers said, before Voices United was formed, she would see students go up to the blind student who was coming to their practices. Her students would say hi, but after that, they didn’t know what to do next, she said.

“I think the other students watching Grace [Shoemaker-Fenwick] interact with them is helping them learn how to do the same,” Rogers said.

“It’s really bridging the gap for both unique entities,” she said.

While Rogers will be leaving her position at DHS at the end of the 2024-25 school year, the plan is to continue to expand the program.

For whomever comes in to take over as choir teacher, “it is part of the job expectation at this point that they are going to continue this … there is no way that it is going to go away," she said.

The plan is to work toward establishing Voices United as its own enrolled class. Under the current setup, meeting during that study hall, students only get about 20 minutes of practice, and sometimes Rogers’ students will get pulled out to finish a test or assignment for another class, Rogers said.

As an established class, it would also be open to other students with disabilities outside of the life skills class, along with all students in the school who aren’t currently enrolled in choir, Rogers said.