These 2 Instructors Receive Plenty of Bravos

Thousand Oaks teacher Kristi Colell is up for a prestigious award in arts education, but she swears she would be just as happy to see the honor go to her competition.

The other Ventura County nominee for the Los Angeles Music Center’s Bravo Award?

Colell’s husband of 34 years, Bruce, who teaches music at Camarillo High School.

“It’s a great honor,” said Kristi Colell, 59, an art teacher at Newbury Park High School. “To be a nominee is awesome. To win is exceptional.”

The annual Bravo Award, worth $2,000, is given out each March to one art instructor in Southern California. This year’s pool of nominees includes 32 art, music and film teachers from Ventura, Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino and Orange counties.

The Colells -- a dynamic teaching duo who have co-written musicals, performed for the pope and taken students all over the world for arts competitions -- have been up for the award together three times.

This year, he was nominated by Camarillo High School Principal Sylvia Jackson, and she by a fellow Newbury Park High School teacher.

Bruce Colell, 62, is best known for his California Jazz Girlz choir at Camarillo High, a group of nine young women that has won national awards for its precise harmonies and “doo-bop-doo-wops.”

The all-girls choir evolved from an extracurricular club he started in 1991. He met with the girls every Monday night and at lunch twice a week for a decade, in addition to teaching a full load of classes, until the school endorsed the enterprise as a music class two years ago.

Bruce Colell, known affectionately around campus as “Doc” because of his PhD in music education, still arranges all the music for the group.

Taking jazz songs -- such as Duke Ellington’s “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)” -- he maps out the notes in a way that gives range to a choir made up entirely of soprano voices.

“We try to sing very complex things perfectly,” Bruce Colell said.

He gives the girls voice lessons before school, hosts more rehearsals on his lunch hour and leads them in 45 concerts a year at schools and around the community. Last week, the singers left on a two-week trip to China, where they are performing at school assemblies as part of a cultural exchange between the two countries.

The teacher’s dedication doesn’t go unnoticed.

“We’re like his whole life,” said Camarillo High senior Krissy Blickenstaff, 18, a member of the choir for three years.

On a recent school day, the assembled Jazz Girlz agreed that Bruce Colell is, by far, the best teacher any of them has ever had.

“He’s such an amazing musician,” said Claire Davidson, 16. “He makes up harmonies for us on the spot.”

“It’s totally ‘Mr. Holland’s Opus,’ ” added Trine Lassen, 17, referring to the movie starring Richard Dreyfuss as a beloved music teacher.

On Newbury Park High’s campus, similar accolades are voiced about Kristi Colell.

“She really cares about the students and wants us to excel,” said senior Elaina Heathcote, 17, who is in Kristi Colell’s advanced art class. “At the same time, she lets you be free with your mind and think for yourself.”

“She has the talent, and she explains everything so you can understand it,” said Cambria Griffith, 18. The art student then points out her teacher’s eclectic outfit: pinstripe pants and suspenders, black stockings and platform flip-flops.

“Look at her -- how could you not love her? She’s such a character.”

In between teaching classes at Newbury Park High, Kristi Colell spearheaded an effort to build the school a performing arts center, putting on seven plays a year for 10 years to help raise money for the cause.

The $2.1-million theater finally opened in 1999.

Getting it built, she said, “brought home the fact that the arts are important in the community.”

Despite their dedication to the profession now, neither of the Colells started out with a burning desire to teach. In fact, both said they did it to pay the bills while they chased their own dreams in art and music.

Bruce Colell wanted to write movie scores in Hollywood; Kristi Colell wanted to become a watercolor painter in Ireland.

Instead, they each landed -- separately -- at Channel Islands High School in Oxnard.

When they bumped into each other one day in the copy room, Bruce Colell said he immediately told one of his friends, who was a counselor at the school, “I’m going to marry that girl.”

They have lived in Camarillo ever since, raising three daughters there. They also stay active in their church’s choir, which performed for Pope John Paul II in 1992.

As for the Bravo Award, the Colells are hoping for a tie. But it’s fair to say neither of them will be disappointed if the other nabs the award.

“I am a good art teacher and a good drama teacher,” Kristi Colell said. “But Bruce -- he just gives the world to his students. I don’t know of any other teacher who deserves it as much as him.”

Funny, her husband says the same thing about her.