[title subtitle=”words: Marla Cantrell
Images: courtesy Josh Ray and Fort Smith Public Schools”][/title]
It’s midday at Southside High School in Fort Smith, Arkansas. Students hustle from class to class. Still others gather in the office, talking in bright sentences, their voices echoing off the walls. If you could collect this kind of energy, you could sell it on the black market to worn-out adults all across town who are already counting the hours until quitting time.
In the midst of these students is Southside’s assistant band director, Josh Ray. Tall, dark-haired, smiling, he talks easily with the students, answering questions, asking after several of them. He looks at home here, completely in his element.
At thirty-one years of age, Josh can still conjure up images of his own time as a student at Southside. He played trumpet in the band, sang in the choir one year, and he was an offensive lineman on the football team from junior high on. He enjoyed all of it, but when it came time to pick a career, the choice was simple. He loved music and couldn’t imagine his life without it.
So Josh enrolled at Arkansas Tech in Russellville. He liked the structure of his days. He was learning to play every instrument so that he could one day teach others, a feat that required diligence and practice. In his off-time, he’d often go to the gym, a place he would remember always.
Because it was there, at the gym, that he saw a girl named Sarah, who had also attended Southside. “I didn’t see her again for two weeks,” Josh says. “She was a history major, and I made every attempt I could to walk past the history building, but I never ran into her. I finally saw her at the gym again and in the process of working up the guts to ask her on a date, I dropped my keys like four or five times, and I waited until she was running on the treadmill to talk to her. It was the worst possible scenario.
“I must have caught her at a weak moment because she said yes. We went on a coffee date and went to Walmart. It was meant to be, because I did everything wrong, and that should have messed it up but it didn’t.”
That first date led to more dates, which led to their engagement and then to marriage. “When I knew I loved my wife was when I realized she made me better in every way. My grades went up. I was working harder in school. I love everything about my wife. Everything good about me can be tied to her.”
Josh’s dream was to land a job at Southside, something he saw as a long-shot. But when a position opened ten years ago, he applied. “I was so thankful just to get an interview,” Josh says. “I told my wife, ‘There’s no chance this will ever happen.’ And then I got the phone call and for whatever reason, all my family was there, and they got to hear the news with me. The guy who hired me was my band director, Steve Kesner.”
He remembers his first months on the job. When he showed up for work, he felt like he was under a microscope. “That was great for me,” Josh says, “because it kept me from doing the stupid things I probably would have done on my own. I’d study at home. Sometimes I’d take an instrument, like a clarinet, home and practice. The hard part was calling Mr. Kesner “Steve,” but he sat me down finally and told me I had to now that we were working together.”
There were days when Josh could hardly believe he’d been given this chance. “I came from a situation that’s like a lot of families. We didn’t have a ton of money, but I had two parents who loved each other and really invested in me and my younger brother. Failure at school was not an option. We always did the best we could, and my parents made sure we were plugged into great influences.
I’ve spent my whole career surrounded by masters.
“When I look back, I can see that the collective tie in all these influential people was that they were from Fort Smith Schools. These men and women invested in me, and so when I had the opportunity to come back and do the same thing for students, it was pretty meaningful.”
Josh marvels at the growth in the band program, across every group of students. When he was in school, students were more likely to be divided into cliques. “Now, you see kids from every different background mingle together. At ballgames, you’ll see cheerleaders and athletes and members of the Dixie Belles leave their places to play with the band at halftime. We had a young man with autism who graduated last year as an All-Region trumpet player. He loves music, and I had the pleasure of working with him from seventh grade to twelfth. I got to know his parents and see his growth. It gives me chills to think about it.
“We have this massive group of band kids that gather before school, and the first day of school they’ll meet up. If you’re a sophomore, you immediately know nearly 300 people.”
Josh says the same growth is happening at Northside, the city’s other high school. “There’s something about working on a team and about knowing other people depend on you. If you’re on a marching team, and you go the wrong way, you can derail the whole thing. They learn collaborative skills, communication skills. It does a lot for work ethic. There are lots of individual opportunities, where students play by themselves or audition. I’ve seen countless young men and women develop their personalities, who lose their shyness, just because they’ve had to in that environment. And I try to be a motivator. I set the bar above their heads and convince them they can do it. And they always do.”
One of the highlights of his decade-long career happened in 2014 when he was asked to conduct one of the pieces in a memorial concert honoring Bill Shaver III, a former Northside band director who worked for the school system for thirty-four years, and was Josh’s wife’s grandfather. Mr. Shaver passed away in December 2013.
“It was an emotional time for me. You couldn’t find a person who ever had one bad thing to say about Mr. Shaver. The first time I met him, I’d gone to Thanksgiving dinner with Sarah’s family. I was horrified because I was this new, green band director who didn’t know anything, and he was a legend. He sat for two hours with me and talked to me like I was his equal. He had an incredible impact on me and thousands of other people.
“I had this moment when I was with the Northside Band in rehearsal, and I thought back to when I was in college, and I was hoping that I could get any job at all. And there I was, getting to work with Southside, which is a blessing, and then getting to work with the great kids at Northside, and I just stopped to count my blessings.
“I don’t know if I was worthy,” Josh says, and this statement, so full of humility, is one of the things that is most striking about him. And with that humility an equal amount of joy. Being the father to his young son, Hudson; anticipating the birth of his second son, Harrison, later this month; the thrill he still feels when talking about his wife, Sarah, who’s a counselor at Kimmons Junior High, a job she loves.
Right now, Josh is concentrating on his growing family and planning for his sons’ futures. On his playlist is band music, Mumford and Sons, Coldplay, and sermons by Tommy Nelson, a pastor Josh’s brother and best friend, Jacob, introduced him to.
There are things that bring him down, of course. “When you have a student who’s not being fed, or you have a student whose dad beat her mom and she saw it, and then she’s supposed to come to band the next day and care, then it’s hard to separate yourself from that. My faith is big for me. I keep a list of all my students, and I pray for them, maybe two per day, and it’s amazing to see how kids pull themselves out, how they make it through. Education will give you a grateful heart because you’ll see how good you had it.”
Josh, who believes being a teacher is a calling, loves to trace the steps that led him to this job. He says he’s been surrounded by masters his entire career. The thought that he’s a master himself never seems to cross his mind, although it seems entirely likely that he is.
