More honors bestowed on Annandale HS orchestra director Annie Ray

Grammy Award winner Annie Ray and her orchestra students at Annandale High School will play the National Anthem at the Washington Nationals game on Friday, April 19.

Annandale students, families, and community members can purchase tickets in section 405 for the discounted price of $16. The Nationals vs. Astros game starts at 6:45 p.m. at Nationals Park.  

On April 16, the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors passed a resolution honoring Annie Ray “for her inspiring accomplishments which have changed the lives of students and parents in our community.”

Ray is the recipient of the 2024 Grammy Music Educator Award and was named FCPS 2023 Outstanding Secondary School Teacher. At the BoS meeting, Board Chair Jeffrey McKay called her “a true celebrity.”

The resolution says Ray’s “vision, leadership, passion, and talent are evident in her work.”

It says the Crescendo Orchestra Annie Ray developed during the height of the pandemic, “brings the joy of orchestra to high school students with severe developmental and intellectual disabilities.”

She founded the FCPS Parent Orchestra in 2018, in which parents and caregivers of students in orchestra or strings learn to play their students’ instruments. It has grown to more than 200 participants and is now so popular that there is a waitlist to join.

Winning a Grammy not only brought national and international attention to FCPS, McKay said, but also highlights “what Annie is doing here to involve the most vulnerable in our community and give them access to the things that otherwise would be too difficult to achieve. Music in so many ways is therapeutic for all of us, but particularly for people with special needs.”

Related story: AHS music teacher brings home a Grammy

Aside from all her accomplishments, Ray said at the board meeting, she is now known as “the teacher who got to hug Taylor Swift.”

Ray noted that Annandale High School students speak 59 different languages and come from a diversity of “backgrounds, perspectives, and strengths.” While that kind of diversity can lead to conflict, “the love of making music has been our foundation for understanding, community, and progress.”

“Crescendo Orchestra is one of the most joyous and humbling experiences of my career,” she said. “They teach me more every day than I will ever teach them.”

“Music is so humbling because to be really great at it you first have to be really bad at it. And you have to do so very loudly where everyone can hear,” Ray said.

“We are asking students to be incredibly brave – and at a time when they’re very much inward,” she said. “When students struggle with a math problem, they can do so privately. When students struggle with a new music skill, they have to get quickly comfortable with being outward.”

Some of the best teachers in FCPS are in performing arts classes, she said. “As Meryl Streep told me at the Grammys, a music educator changed her life and it is why she is where she is today.”