Hello and welcome to my High School Choral Resources website!  My name is Barbara Retzko.  On July 1, 2020, I applied for Service Retirement from my job at Ridge High School after 40 years in the Choral Music Education business!  What a ride!

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While I had been thinking about retiring for a few years, I could never have imagined that I would end a 40-year career as a result of a global pandemic!  Being sent home in March of 2020 to turn my dining room table into my entire teaching space became too much for me to manage.  My choral program had been fractured and broken.  The split-second we left the building, the job, as I created it starting in 1980, had ended.  In the blink of an eye, all that I loved, valued and treasured about teaching, which was always the time spent with the kids, was now gone.  By mid-May, I looked at the writing on the wall and felt the timing was right to walk away.  On my own terms.  In my own time.  On the crest of my own wave.

So today, I am taking all that I brought home and all that is on my hard drive and turning it into a repository for ideas and solutions.  Please take what you need and use it for your classes.  It is here to share.  To help.  To make things a bit easier.  

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As I began to think about paying my career forward, my husband, Rick, challenged me with the following questions: