Kris Wernsing will be the first to tell you: he couldn't carry a tune in a bucket.

Amanda, his wife, played flute in the Teutopolis High School band. Kris went into auto body work right out of school and spent more than two decades at a local shop before becoming the manager of a heavy-duty semi-truck body shop—also in Teutopolis, seven minutes from home. Music was not his lane.

But somewhere between the two of them, they raised three musicians.

Their oldest, Lilli, is a junior at Teutopolis High School and the most deeply immersed in the performing arts of anyone in the family. She serves as band president, was this year's marching band drum major, sings in the choir—where she earned ILMEA district all-state honors—performs in school musicals, and dances on the Pomerettes team. This spring, she'll play Anna in the school's production of Frozen. She wants to major in music in college.

And the instrument she plays? Her mother's flute.

When Lilli came home saying she wanted to join band and was looking at the flute, Amanda laughed. "How convenient," she told her, "because I have one right here in the closet."

Amanda teases her parents about it now. They spent all that money on that flute years ago, and she barely touched it after high school. But Lilli has more than made up for it—playing in band, in church choir when the parish asks, and heading toward a college music program. 

"Mom and Dad," Amanda says, "you guys are getting your money out of that flute."

Lilli had taken piano lessons from roughly fourth grade through eighth grade before picking up the flute, and that foundation shaped more than just her own playing. When her younger brother Gage told the family he wanted to try out for percussion in the junior high band, it was Lilli who told him he should learn piano first. He listened. Took lessons for a few years. Made the drums.

"He probably wouldn't advertise that," Amanda says, "but he can play piano."

Their middle child, Ava, plays saxophone and has explored violin. She's also a volleyball player and cheerleader. Gage, beyond the drumline, runs cross country and track and plays soccer. The Wernsings have encouraged all three children to pursue both the arts and athletics—not as competing commitments, but as complementary ones.

When asked what music teaches their children, Kris answers in one word: "Dedication."

Amanda builds on it. "It takes discipline to practice outside of class," she says. "And you have to come together to make it work. For the song to sound right, everyone has to do their part." She's noticed the spillover: all three kids are strong students, consistently on the honor roll.

Both Kris and Amanda are Teutopolis graduates—class of '99 and 2002—and they never seriously considered leaving. Amanda went to college for radiologic technology and had a job offer in St. Louis, but she and Kris barely discussed it. "It was almost like it was out of the question," she says. "We didn't really want to go anywhere else."

The timing aligned. Kris's father was retiring and offered them the home place—a farm that has been in the Wernsing family since 1839. They still keep chickens and goats, and the kids show animals through 4-H. Kris is the youngest of seven, and his father wanted the land to stay in the family. "I couldn't wait for that night," Kris says of the moment his dad made the offer.

Amanda, who now works as a clinical analyst at Sarah Bush Lincoln, sees the value of their choice every day. She commutes to Mattoon and hears coworkers talk about school concerns she's never had to worry about. Her own sister moved away and had to decide between a large public district and paying for private school. "I never felt the need to make that kind of a choice," Amanda says.

"That's the way we were raised," Kris adds. "So we're raising ours to be part of the community."

In Teutopolis, that community hums along in many registers—on the athletic fields, in the parish, across the farmland, and in the rehearsal rooms where a mother's flute found its second life in her daughter's hands. The Wernsings didn't plan a house full of musicians. But they built a home where things get passed down—land, instruments, discipline, faith—and trusted that their children would find their own way to make it sing.