Students, staff surprise ailing veteran teacher with a medley of his favorites

PALMER — Not many students, one seventh-grader noted, can say they spent part of their day off from school sneaking up on a beloved teacher’s house as part of a school-orchestrated surprise.

This past Friday was a work day for teachers, meaning no school for students. But around 1 p.m., close to 75 Colony Middle School students, staff and parents loaded onto buses and into cars, lyrics in hand, to surprise veteran science teacher Kevin Zagyva with a special at-home concert.

The troop walked silently from around the corner where the buses were parked to converge on the lawn in front of Zagyva’s home, where they began singing “Amazing Grace.” Watching from the front windows, Zagyva stopped what he was doing and stepped out onto the porch, tears in his eyes, to witness the love and support of his school community.

“I don’t have a speech,” he said afterward, to much laughter from the crowd.

As music teacher Toby Lambert and student Jared Hopkins led the next song, “Lean on Me,” on piano and guitar, Principal Mary McMahon and school safety officer Eugene Parson joined Zagyva on the makeshift stage. With each song — “You Raise Me Up” by Josh Groban, “Budapest” by George Ezra, “Ends of the Earth” by Lord Huron and “I Lived” by OneRepublic — a new group of students and teachers embraced Zagyva and sang with him.

“We love you Mr. Zagyva!” a few students shouted.

This school year would have marked Zagyva’s 10th with Colony Middle, if not for the return of stage 4 kidney cancer this past spring. Initially diagnosed in 2012, Zagyva thought he was in the clear this January, when all his tests came back negative. Then, after a snowmachine trip over spring break, he said, he began to feel pain around his pelvis. For weeks he dismissed it as simply soreness, only to find at the end of May that the cancer had not only returned, but metastasized.

“It was as if he dodged the bullet and then all of a sudden it was back,” said Zagyva’s friend, Steve Young, a language arts teacher at Colony Middle.

Fellow friend and teacher Tricia Kenney remembered how she and her husband, John Cox — who also taught with Zagyva — felt when they first heard the news.

“It was heartbreaking,” she said.

Chemotherapy has kept Zagyva from teaching as a full-time employee, but it hasn’t been able to keep him from showing up at Colony Middle to tutor, supervise and just hang out with students. “Kevin is authentic,” Kenney said. “He is real, he is genuine and compassionate, and he gives the real him to everybody.”

Cox said he’s witnessed that, too, in Zagyva’s interaction with students, as of late.

“He tells them it’s a cancer killing experience, being with them … and he means it, and they feel it.”

Kenney said she and Cox had come to think of Zagyva as family, along with all of the people associated with Colony Middle.

“Right away I felt like I knew him very well,” she said. “He’s like my dad.”

Young described a rather different relationship with Zagyva, one that consisted of mostly political and theological banter between a devout Catholic (Zagyva) and a former Catholic (Young).

“He’s a really complex guy,” Young said. “He’s a scientist but he’s also a philosopher.”

Lambert described Zagyva as “grounded” and “realistic,” which Cox said was also accurate.

“Sometimes he’s on the top of the world ’cause he thinks he’s gonna beat it, and other times he’s thinking about his daughter and not being able to dance with her at her wedding,” Cox said. “Those kinds of comments are like … they rip your heart out.”

But watching and being a part of that Friday performance, the teachers said, was just “Wow.”

Despite not having a speech prepared, Zagyva had a few words to share when the music ended.

“The Lord has blessed me, very much so,” he said. “You guys, you really do, you give me strength.”

At a student’s request, everyone present joined in for a big huddle and raised their hands in a school cheer to close out the performance.

On the bus ride back, a few students spoke of their love for their teacher.

“He was one of my favorite teachers,” said seventh-grader Hailey Hancock, who was in Zagyva’s class last year.

Seventh-grader Jordan Larson said that, though she never had a class with Zagyva, she “felt so terrible” when she heard of his diagnosis, having had some of her own family members die of cancer.

Her classmate, Emma Clark, said the performance made her feel “happy and sad,” but agreed with Larson that it was “really special and heartfelt.”

The Zagyvas

Sharon Zagyva said later that the mini concert was the perfect gesture for her husband, who loves music.

“Music feeds his soul,” she said.

It also helps put him in the right mood for a certain occasion. While the song “Budapest” is just a favorite for road-tripping, he said, the band Lord Huron calms him down for chemo.

Looking forward, Kevin Zagyva said his long-term goal is to get healthy so he can go back to work. Whether that means just working one period a day next semester or coming back next year for a full class load, he’s hoping to return.

But if that isn’t in the cards, he said he’s not afraid of death, or the unknown.

“There’s little things that I do worry about, in regards to when I’m gone, but … there’s help from above,” he said.

“You don’t know the total tapestry that God has woven,” he said.

Kevin’s mother also taught him “how to die well,” his wife said, when she was diagnosed with mesothelioma. Despite her sickness and pain, Sharon said, she insisted on having her grandchildren nearby, always entertaining. On her last day, in 2002, she passed quietly, surrounded by family and friends

“It was beautiful,” Sharon said. “Watching that was, for me, part of my conversion (to Catholicism).”

No matter what happens, Kevin said he will never forget Colony Middle School. In his 30 years of teaching, never has he had such a close relationship with his boss, he said, or had a fellow faculty member, Parson, send him a bible verse every morning of his illness.

“Colony is a special place,” he said.

Caitlin Skvorc is a former Frontiersman reporter born and raised in Alaska.