Jasper, Southridge and Forest Park Students Perform in Indiana All-State Honor Choir

Eleven students from Jasper High School, Southridge and Forest Park High School represented Dubois County in the Indiana All‑State Honor Choir in Fort Wayne on Jan. 16 and 17. The group rehearsed at IU Purdue Fort Wayne under a noted conductor and performed a Saturday evening concert at the Embassy Theatre, giving local singers a statewide stage and exposure to collegiate‑level repertoire.

Jasper High School Choir sent Aanias Jackson, Ally Larkin and Ava Claire Werne. Southridge was represented by Russell Kendall, Katelynn Goodwin, Lilah Rasche, William Dubon and Katelyn Wright. Forest Park High School sent Eve Gatwood, John DeWitte and Jacob Keller. The named list totals 11 students; an internal roundup described the contingent as “about a dozen,” an approximate phrasing reconciled by the explicit participant list.

Selection to the ensemble was competitive. “They were chosen along with about 200 of Indiana’s best high school choral singers by a very selective audition process, which took place in the fall.” Students spent intensive rehearsal time preparing the program: “All day on Friday and Saturday morning, they rehearsed under the direction of renowned conductor, Dr. Pearl Shangkuan at IU Purdue Fort Wayne. They then performed a concert at the beautiful Embassy Theatre on Saturday evening.” The concert featured “collegiate-level music from various time periods, composers, and styles, and the students sang in four different languages (English, Latin, Korean, and Malaysian).”

For Dubois County schools, participation in the All‑State Honor Choir is both a recognition of individual talent and a signal of local music‑program strength. Students gain concentrated instruction from an outside conductor, experience performing in a historic venue and the kind of repertoire that college audition panels and conservatory programs value. Those qualitative benefits can translate into stronger music curricula and community support for arts programming at Jasper, Southridge and Forest Park.

The Fort Wayne appearance also places the local effort in a broader regional context. Large All‑State programs elsewhere have drawn thousands of auditioning students and selected large ensembles; for scale, neighboring-state programs have reported tens of thousands of auditions and several thousand student participants in multi-tiered All‑State networks. While Indiana’s Honor Choir that included Dubois County singers was made up of roughly 200 selected voices this year, the broader phenomenon underscores how competitive statewide music programs have become.

Local parents, teachers and school officials can point to this week’s performances as concrete evidence of student achievement and curriculum payoff. The immediate takeaway for Dubois County is clear: Aanias Jackson, Ally Larkin, Ava Claire Werne, Russell Kendall, Katelynn Goodwin, Lilah Rasche, William Dubon, Katelyn Wright, Eve Gatwood, John DeWitte and Jacob Keller represented the area on a statewide stage, and the experience may bolster recruitment, retention and community backing for school music programs in the months ahead.