This past school year was Marla Sitton’s last at Montezuma-Cortez high and middle schools, where she’s been the choir teacher for the past 30 years.
“It was the only place I ever applied,” Sitton said. “It was the luck of the draw, I guess.”
As she looked back on the years, she remembered how she had taken the choir to Colorado Springs, Denver and Salt Lake City. In her time there, she guessed 40 high school students and another 45 middle schoolers made it to the Colorado All-State Choir.
“I’ve had a really great career,” she said. “It’s been so rewarding.”
Yet, funnily enough, “I never wanted to be a teacher,” Sitton laughed.
“I loved performing arts,” she explained, but her mom refused to let her pursue just that at college. She pushed her to study education, too.
So she did, and ended up loving it.
She remembered student teaching with Gary and Marci Hall and Bennie Rawson, and how “I learned so much from them.”
“I’ll really miss my kids,” she said, of her students. “That’s what I call them, my kids.”
In speaking with a few of her students, it was clear that kind of close relationship was reciprocated.
“She’s motherly almost, another mom,” said Xander Bennetts, a recent graduate of M-CHS. “She really cares about us. She asks personal questions, worries about us.”
Amita Crowley, a high schooler who has had Sitton since middle school, said, “She’s basically a second mom to me.”
Crowley said that Sitton always reaches out after a golf tournament and asks how she played.
“She’s always there,” Crowley said. “She taught me to stand up for myself and that I’m enough. She’s made me a much better person.”
Outside of music – which “doesn’t have to stop when they graduate” – Sitton said she hopes her students not only had a great experience in her class, but learned to be decent to one another.
“You don’t have to be friends, but you do have to be decent,” she said. “I try to be kind, consistent and stable. I hope they learned that.”
“I’d always tell them to be kind and loving, and they’d say ‘kind of loving,’” Sitton laughed.
Carter Tanner, a recent M-CHS graduate who was in Sitton’s class for seven years, said, “You can tell she cares and loves and wants what’s best for each and every one of us.”
“She’s created a caring space,” Tanner said. “We all know each other, which is crazy for a class of 40.”
Sitton said that her final concert at the high school on Tuesday, May 13, was memorable and a bit longer than she anticipated.
“There were a few surprises,” she said. “My daughters and husband Bobby put together a slideshow, and several students made videos and put them in there.”
Plus, she performed a duet with Crowley, which was “so fun and meaningful,” especially since “I don’t perform often.”
Yet, it wasn’t her first performance.
“She and Bobby sang at my wedding,” said Andy Bennetts, Xander’s dad who also had Sitton as a teacher. “The Mesa Choir did too, and she directed it.”
Andy said they stayed connected over the years, and when he started teaching music at Mesa Elementary, he “leaned on her a lot.”
“She’s got a big heart, and lifts people up that other people maybe overlook, or that don’t fit in anywhere else. They feel part of her choir,” Andy said. “And years later, they’re still part of her family.”
Xander added that, “What she’s built here is so special, and she should still come to choir concerts and stay plugged in.”
“I’m just so grateful for all she’s done for me and the other kids,” he said. “She’s helped us find our voice.”
“She’s an amazing teacher,” Crowley said. “My voice has matured so much with her teaching me.”
Sitton said that when she first told her students her plans to retire, “there was a lot of tears.”
“I jokingly told them, ‘I’m not dead. I’m still going to be in the area.’ A lot of them laughed,” she said. “I’ll still talk with them and run into them around town.”
She thanked her family for being so supportive, all the parents and students over the years, Angela Gabardi, the middle school drama teacher who “I wouldn’t be half the teacher I am without her support,” and Rodney Ritthaler and Andrew Campo “for all their years of support and confidence and friendship.”
In retirement, Sitton plans to “relax” and be a grandparent.
“It’s a good time to be done,” she said. “And I’m still going to be in the area.”
