Mineola High School teacher Megan Messina spreads the 'magic' of choir
Megan Messina fell in love of choral music (and people) in college. Credit: Newsday/Alejandra Villa Loarca
Megan Messina’s career as a choral music teacher at Mineola High School began, oddly enough, because of a college major in biology.
Messina, 48, grew up in Garden City. “If you were a smart kid in Garden City, you went into the sciences,” she said. And so, she obediently began her college career at the University of Delaware with an expected major — one she found she didn’t like.
Her parents told her she should spend the next semester taking the five most interesting courses she could think of. One was chorus. “I want to be with these people, these singing people,” she thought then, and changed her major to music education. She went on to earn a master’s degree and doctorate at Hofstra University.
She has taught at Mineola High School since 2002, instilling in her students what she calls the “magic” of choir. “It’s a place where you can safely explore . . . what it means to be human. You can time-travel in a song. You can location-travel in a song,” she said. For instance, she could perform a spiritual, a genre created by African Americans in the South during the era of slavery. For a white person, she said, “Here was a peek into a different type of American experience, to sing the music of somebody else’s pain or joy.”
Messina teaches three chorus groups during the school day and two choirs after school. One of the after-school groups performs pop and rock music; the other is an a cappella group. She also teaches voice lessons during the school day.
Messina has collaborated with colleagues for cross-curricular projects — for instance, she paired with an Irish Identity elective teacher for a unit on Irish music. She’s also had choral students work with a local composer to create a piece reflecting their feelings during the pandemic, which they performed virtually.
In addition to her high school groups, Messina runs the Mineola Choral Society’s 60-person adult community ensemble and is an adjunct professor of music education at Molloy University.
She also accompanied the Malverne High School select choir on a trip to Italy, serving as their piano accompanist as they performed at the Vatican and at a church in Rome.
Early in her career, Messina spent a year teaching choir at Malverne High School — where she met her husband, Michael, who was then the band director but is now the district supervisor for music and art. They live in North Massapequa and have two daughters, Emily, 17, and Paola, 14.
Aislinn Oliveri, 34, was a student of Messina’s in the early 2000s and became a teacher at Mineola High School herself, instructing in theater, dance and public speaking. She says Messina’s qualities as a teacher reach beyond the arts.
“She is so open to listening, open to new things, open to making sure that all her students relate to her,” Oliveri said. “She just connects to people right away and makes people feel heard and safe.”
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Beth Whitehouse writes about families, parenting and great things to do with the kids on Long Island. She’s been a Newsday editor and shared a 1997 Newsday staff Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the crash of TWA Flight 800.
