“All it takes,” Mr. Keeney says, “is a little compassion and a little time to listen, and a little time to have a free space where students feel comfortable enough that they can come talk to you.”

After 30 years in the classroom, he has seen over and over again how making that effort – “to know the student beyond what’s happening in the 47 minutes that we see them” – makes a difference.

He knows this, too, because when he was a struggling young high school student, about the same age as Evita, it happened to him.

Keeney grew up in Lee’s Summit, outside Kansas City, Missouri. His family struggled after his parents divorced, leaving his mom to provide for the family. With no college education, “she was left with the mortgage, the car payment, and five kids.”

His mother worked so hard to make ends meet, that by the time Keeney was in high school, he decided he needed to help out. “So I got a job at 14, working at a hardware store.” He had uncles who were mechanics, “and so I already knew how to rebuild a carburetor and work on cars. And so I thought: ‘I’m going to get my GED. I’m going to drop out and I’m going to earn money.’”

Keeney had been playing the violin since elementary school, and was good at it. One of the first people he told about his decision to leave school was his orchestra director, Marge Kuehn. 

“I was not sure about this decision,” Keeney recalls, “and I felt I could talk to her.”

She listened carefully, and then told him something surprising: “‘You would be a really good teacher.’” Keane laughed at her and said, “well, teachers don’t make money.”

Marge Kuehn didn’t stop there. “She said, ‘well, there’s more to it than that’, and actually sat me down and showed me her paycheck stub.” 

And then she asked him to shadow her for a couple of days, to see what the job was like. As Keeney watched her with her students, “I thought, this is actually kind of fun.” 

The more he thought about it, her suggestion began to sink in: “I love music, and this didn’t seem like work.” What he’d seen in Marge Kuehn was both her passion for music, and that willingness to go outside the lesson plans to take a real interest in him, as a person. 

He stayed in school, got his degree from the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and became a teacher. “All because of her.”

He began teaching in the Kansas City public schools, and 21 years ago moved to Lee’s Summit. 

He got married along the way. Diane Keeney teaches second grade at nearby Meadow Lane Elementary School, and they have two daughters, Jillian, and Addison, both in high school themselves. 

Through the years, he kept in touch with his mentor, Marge Kuehn, seeking her advice or just letting her know how he was doing, until her death a few years ago. “She was alive in my teaching.” After 30 years in the classroom, he still thinks of her. 

And he still feels the thrill of watching his students take an unknown piece of music and, with his help, master it. “I know the end product is going to not only inspire me, it’s going to inspire them. And it’s a wonderful thing.”

So much of learning an instrument, and a complicated piece of music, is the hard work of drilling and practicing to learn skills and technique. “It’s the daily grind in the process that we don’t necessarily like.” 

But the goal, what he calls “the spark,” is always out there … something to reach for, and to look forward to. 

Each semester, each year, he can hear that hard work pay off when his students give a performance. “Seeing them develop those skills, and make the music themselves, and feel the spark. And then when they see it in the audience, there’s magic in that.”

Like many orchestra directors, he teaches at different schools, and different grades, which creates those opportunities to go beyond the daily lessons. “I get to see these students from seventh grade all the way to 12th grade, so I get to know them for more than just one year.” 

It was in her eighth grade year that Keeney became Evita Churchill’s teacher. She was struggling with some issues, including a condition called Conversion Disorder, a mental health condition that can cause uncontrollable physical symptoms.

She was often absent, and on the days when she was in school, Mr. Keeney was one of the few people who noticed. “He made sure I knew he cared about me,” she says. He’d seek her out in the hallway to let her know it was good to see her again. “He still doesn’t know how much that truly meant to me.”

Evita stayed with the orchestra, gaining skill with her violin, and finding comfort in the music and in the pieces Keeney chose for the class to learn. “Freshman year was when I really started to see how much I loved his class.”

One year, he had the orchestra learn “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” the 1987 hit from Guns N’ Roses. “My dad loved that song,” Evita recalls. Her father passed away in 2018, so “when I learned we were going to play that song, it made me really happy.”

Through her sophomore and junior years, while Evita struggled with problems, including the loss of a family member, Joe Keeney’s class was a sanctuary. 

Sometimes he’d joke with her, or make a passing compliment, or just drop some comment that let her know he cared.

The orchestra at Lee’s Summit North is the largest in the Kansas City area, with about 223 students, says the school’s principal, Dr. Tim Collins. And much of that success stems from Joe Keeney. “He genuinely loves what he does, and you can see that every day.”

Despite the program’s size, Collins says, “he’s made it such a welcoming environment.”

Keeney attributes that directly to his former teacher: “Marge inspired that.” Getting to know his students over the course of several years, he explains, allows him to create that family atmosphere in his orchestra: “Music is a vehicle that heals, and helps.” 

Collins, now in his third year as principal at Lee’s Summit North, grew up in the area, and graduated from the school in 2003. He’s watched as the area has grown more diverse, and as Lee’s Summit, with its vibrant, historic downtown, has become a “hustling and bustling suburb of south Kansas City.” 

Collins takes pride in the school and its music programs, and of the teachers. Keeney, he says, is consistently one of the district’s standout educators. “He’s kind of a living legend in our area for orchestra.”

The kind of living legend that makes a student, unsolicited, nominate him for a national teaching award. 

Evita, who’s not in Mr. Keeney’s class this year while she works on getting her diploma, says the idea came to her some time after that moment when he hugged her and said, “Love ya, kid.” Over the years, he’d become her favorite teacher, and she’d noticed how hard he tried to make other students, including her LGBTQ classmates, feel welcome and validated. 

Evita began searching around for awards or honors for teachers. One day, when she and her mother were doing some research, they ran across Honored. “And I thought, ‘that would be perfect.’”

So she wrote up an application and sent it in. “Mr. Keeney made me feel like I mattered not only in the class but in the world,” her nomination says. “Thank you, Mr. Keeney for always making me look forward to going to school, and most importantly, thank you for everything you do.”