JANEAL CRABB KREHBIEL,

founder and director of the Lawrence Children’s Choir, is a clinician and festival director throughout the United States. A graduate of Bethel College in Kansas, she earned a master’s degree in music education at Wichita State University.

She taught elementary vocal music in the Denver Public Schools (Colorado), high school vocal music in the Hesston Public Schools (Kansas), and completed fifteen years with the Lawrence, Kansas public schools, teaching grades 7, 8, and 9.  For eighteen years she served as children’s choir director at the Bethel College Mennonite Church. Since she retired from teaching public school, she has devoted herself to working with children all over the country, in addition to her job as artistic director of LCC.

Janeal is an active member of ACDA, MENC, KMEA, and Chorus America.  She is the past president of the Kansas chapter of ACDA. She organized the Kansas Honors Children’s Choir and has directed over 35 regional and all state choirs for children and junior high students through the United States. She was the conductor of the National ACDA Jr. High Honors Choir in Los Angeles in 2005 and will be teaching and conducting in Singapore in March, 2009.  In June, 2009, Ms. Krehbiel will take LCC on a concert tour of Lithuania and Latvia.

In July of 1999, her colleagues in Kansas ACDA awarded her the Harry Robert Wilson Award in recognition of her outstanding contribution to choral music. She was also awarded the Outstanding Middle Level Music Educator for Northeastern Kansas.  Last year, her community awarded her the coveted Phoenix Award  for her artistic service to the young citizens of the Lawrence area.

Ms. Krehbiel also directs Cadenza, the 1st through 3rd grade choir of LCC and maintains and edits the Janeal Krehbiel Choral Series with Santa Barbara Publishing Company.  She has also edited the column on Middle Level/Junior High Choral Music for the ACDA Journal for the past three years.

Janeal is a wife, a mother to two grown daughters, and “Mimi” to three grandchildren.