In a school as layered and dynamic as Galesburg High School, it might be easy for a student to feel like they need to find their place. In Lucy Rieke's classroom, that's not how it works. They bring their place with them.

"I think music is a space for everybody," she said.

Not a slogan. A starting point.

Lucy is in her third year of teaching, every one of them in Galesburg. She arrived as assistant choir director and junior high theater director — a full plate from day one. The past two years, she's taken on the whole thing: all of the high school choirs, plus the entire high school theater program, including a fall play and a spring musical.

"I love it all," she said.

That love is showing up in the numbers. When she stepped into her current role, there were three high school ensembles and around 65 students. The first thing she added was an after-school vocal jazz program — and the energy it created was immediate. A typical vocal jazz ensemble runs 12 to 16 singers, and every one of them performs on their own microphone.

"That immediately got kids invested," she said. "And that's very like pop music."

There's something that happens when a student steps up to that microphone alone, responsible for their own sound. Ownership deepens. Confidence builds. The program now runs two vocal jazz ensembles, and what started as three choirs has grown to five in just two years.

Lucy is quick to share the credit. Dana Corey covers choral programs at Lombard and the junior high — and co-teaches two high school choirs alongside Lucy. That pipeline has been a major part of the program's momentum.

"She's doing a fabulous job," Lucy said. "I'm very grateful for her."

But the numbers, she'll tell you, aren't the point. What she's watching for is something harder to measure.

"I am so proud of them," she said, "not just for the musicians that they are, but for the people that they're becoming." She says it to them directly, often. Every concert cycle, she comes back to the same reminder: "I value the way you treat people way more than you being high-achieving. You as a person are so much more important to me than you as a musician." In a performance-driven world, it's a quiet recalibration — and it shapes the culture of the room.

That philosophy carries naturally into her theater work. She sees choir and stage as different expressions of the same thing: a space where students encounter themselves and each other with honesty. "Theater is all storytelling," she said. "It's an outlet of emotions. And I think that is an act of empathy — feeling how other people could feel in this situation. Or maybe you felt it yourself, and that's you sharing your own story through this character."

The students who fill her ensembles and rehearsals come from the full range of Galesburg's diversity. "In the fine arts, we see the whole spectrum of kids" — athletes and artists, students from very different economic backgrounds. That breadth matters. The stage becomes a place where different kinds of people are doing the real work of understanding each other.

What has surprised Lucy most, three years in, is how consistently her students rise to every expectation she sets — and how they do it. "They might moan and groan through the process," she said, "but at the end of the day, I love seeing their work ethic — and the way that, instead of just running to the top, they pull people up with them as they rise."

This spring, the Galesburg stage comes alive with Mamma Mia! — a show chosen deliberately. The program has a strong group of male performers this year, which opened the casting possibilities that last year's production (the decidedly girl-heavy Mean Girls) didn't have. And the show itself — familiar, fun, full of energy — fits a program that's still building its audience.

Behind every production is a team, and Lucy is clear about that. Russ Ulrich, the theater's technical director, builds the sets, runs lights and sound, and is the reason what happens on stage is visible, audible — and safe. The Mamma Mia! set, finished over spring break, is a big one. When actors are elevated ten feet in the air, it matters who's overseeing the structure beneath them.

"He makes the students look good on stage," she said. "I can teach them how to sing. I can tell them where to stand. But without a gorgeous set behind them, lights that work, and a mic that works — we wouldn't be able to see or hear them."

Lucy started taking piano lessons when she was five years old, grew up in Dwight, and went on to study music education at Western Illinois University. She knew early that music was going to be her life. The only question was how to give it back.

"I just wanted to make other people feel the way that music made me feel," she said. Three years into a career that's already outgrown its original shape, she's doing exactly that.