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Teacher’s music plays on
Students play the Boston piano donated in memory of music; inset Renee Parkinson.
Roy and Natalie Parkinson remember with crystal clarity the moment their daughter, Renee, heard Indiana University of Pennsylvania’s marching band play Amazing Grace. It was halftime. The snow was falling. Renee turned to her mother, beaming, and said, “Mommy, I’m going to college there.”
From the instant Renee played her first instrument in fourth grade, “Music took over her heart,” her mother recalls. And it played an important role through high school and when she attended, you guessed it, IUP, where she was selected for the marching band in her freshman year. And after just one term, Renee switched her major from chemistry to music.
Although she was a gifted flutist, Renee learned to play the piano as a requirement for graduation, and did “a fantastic job” in the process, Mrs. Parkinson recalls. After graduation, Renee taught for a year in Fairfax County, Va., but returned to Pennsylvania because, she told her mother, “that’s where my heart is.”
She accepted a music-teaching position at Fawn and Heights elementary schools in the Highlands School District near Pittsburgh, “where she poured her heart and soul into those children and loved every minute of it.”
Sadly, however, after just three years of teaching there, Renee, then 26, was killed by a drunk driver July 4, 2007. And while her music, it appeared, had been silenced far too early, Renee’s parents had other thoughts.
Looking for a way to memorialize Renee, her parents and sister Lisa… in association with the school district… established a fund to purchase a piano that would replace “Miss P’s” battered classroom instrument. But as is the case with many cash-strapped school districts, Highlands had many pressing needs that competed with the piano purchase, so the memorial funds bought a sound system for school performances.
That’s when the Parkinson family decided to donate two Boston pianos… one for each of the schools where she taught, believing the pianos “represent everything she worked for,” Mrs. Parkinson says.
The Parkinsons made their selections at Trombino Piano Gallerie in Pittsburgh, the exclusive dealer for the family of Steinway-designed pianos in western Pennsylvania.
There, David Bridge, Trombino’s piano-and-organ consultant, recommended a pair of Boston upright pianos (UP-118S), knowing that the parents wanted pianos that could withstand the wear and tear of a school setting and would last a good, long time. Equally important to Renee’s mother was the tone of the piano. “I needed to hear the purity of sound… to stand for her purity and love.”
According to Fawn Elementary School’s principal, Dr. Elizabeth Ehrlich, who hired the young teacher, “She connected with the children she taught in positive ways that made a real difference. They knew she valued them as people and as musicians-in-the-making.”
The principal at Heights Elementary School, Gene Nicastro, echoed those sentiments. “The piano is a wonderful gift,” he says, “something that will last and symbolize what she meant to her students.”
Renee’s father is grateful he had an opportunity to see her working with students, who were in kindergarten through fifth grade. “It felt so good to listen to her play the piano and hear the children sing,” he says fondly.
The Parkinsons are confident their daughter would approve of the Boston pianos. “It’s wonderful to see students use them,” her mother says, “knowing that music was a gift she gave from her heart.”