When Marilee Applebee was a baby, her parents pushed her crib against the bookshelf. She pulled books off the shelf and kept them underneath. Her father, Dick Clark, taught at Ottawa and Yorkville and ran Sylvan Learning Centers. Her mother, Nancy Clark, taught at Ottawa and Morris high schools. They also traveled. Marilee followed both paths — all the way into a 34-year career at Seneca High School that ends this spring.

The walls of her classroom are a map of everything she's believed in. To Kill a Mockingbird. Geography of Holocaust-era Europe. Photographs from Auschwitz, which she and her husband visited on an Eastern Europe trip. Collages from 13 overseas student trips — Paris, Italy, others — taken with Seneca students across the decades. A safe-space flag visible from the hallway.

She teaches language arts, speech, broadcast journalism, and a full-semester class on the Holocaust. Marilee was recognized on Feb. 21st at the Speech state finals in Peoria. This award is given through a collaborative effort of the IHSA and ICTA (Illinois Communication and Theatre Association). Marilee has been very active in the ICTA, including being the 2nd Vice President. Every semester, she has taken her classes to the Illinois Holocaust Museum in Skokie — the second-largest Holocaust museum in the country after the one in Washington D.C. — which does extensive outreach to Holocaust educators and has been one of her primary resources. When the Skokie museum went under construction last semester, they used its Chicago satellite location. She's visited the D.C. museum two or three times, including a three-day ELA teacher workshop in 2015 that helped launch the class in its current form.

The Niemöller poem — "First they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew" — is taught not just as Holocaust history but as a framework: every form of oppression follows the same logic. If you don't speak up, there will be no one left to speak for you. "It's the role of the unoppressed to speak up for the oppressed," she said. The Skokie Museum puts it in terms students can carry: perpetrator, bystander, upstander. Which one are you going to be?

That question connects directly to the other thread of Marilee's career — competitive speech, which she has coached for all 34 years. She started as an assistant because it was the only extracurricular she could offer the school. She's been the head coach ever since; she just can't remember exactly when that started.

The four students in the room came to speech through four very different doors.

Morgan Stockman, a sophomore, describes herself as introverted and shy with people she doesn't know yet. She joined because she thought it would help with communication skills. It has. "Meeting new people — I can actually speak openly, and I don't feel anxiety as much. It comes naturally now. I'm still working on it, of course." This season, her poetry category drew from poems about domestic violence victims — giving voice to people whose suffering she hasn't personally experienced. Her judges told her she has confidence and projection but needs to access more emotion. She's working on it. Her original oratory was about fragile masculinity: how the definition has changed, and how educating young men that there's no one way to be a man could reshape culture.

Talia Jenkins is a freshman who says she's opinionated by nature and needs somewhere to put it. Her original oratory tackled LGBTQ representation in media — why a broader range matters — and she and Marilee began writing it a full year before the competition, researching organizations, parsing data, and making hard cuts. Robin Williams and Nathan Lane didn't make the final eight minutes. "There's just so much good stuff we really wanted to get in there. But we have eight minutes, and something had to go."

Ellenore Tallarico found the program by accident. She passed Morgan in the hallway, asked where she was going, followed her to Marilee's room, heard about poetry reading as a category, and asked if she could try it too. She never went to an informational meeting. She just trusted her friend.

Maddy DeGrush is the senior — theater all four years, basketball until the schedule conflict was resolved, then speech the last two seasons. This year, her dramatic duet acting piece, performed with another senior, required her to play a mother whose child had been kidnapped, meeting the kidnapper in jail after the daughter was finally returned. The emotional demands: grief and rage of a kind she's never lived through. "They had to pull on emotions they haven't had experience with," Marilee said.

That's what makes the program harder than it looks. Projecting isn't enough. Anyone can get loud. The work is an inhabiting experience that isn't yours yet — a domestic violence victim's exhaustion, a mother's terror, the internal life of a character you'll never actually be — and making an audience feel it as true. That skill, Marilee believes, is exactly the same muscle required to speak up for someone who can't speak for themselves.

"Don't be a bystander," she said.

She will retire at the end of this school year. Her parents' books are still under the crib, in a sense — everything she pulled off the shelf and decided to carry forward. Thirty-four years of students in whose hands she's placed the same question the Skokie Museum asks: which one are you going to be?