By Julie Slama | [email protected]

On Oct. 13, hundreds of Glacier Hills kindergartners through fifth-grade students’ voices blended into a sweet melody that brought a huge smile on the face of achievement coach Jeni Wariner.

It was the schoolchildren’s first time singing their school song, one which Wariner wrote with her family.

“She is one of the most musical people I've ever met,” Principal Julie Winfree said. “Not just musical as in she plays a piano for church or that she probably averages a concert a week, sometimes more. She loves music and her entire family is musical, including her daughter and her boyfriend. Her husband is the sound engineer for BYU (Brigham Young University). Jeni is probably the most positive individual I have in my life, just this ray of sunshine. So, when I asked her to write the school song, I trusted she would take her musical background and her positivity to make a beautiful song.”

Wariner, who has taught music and plays keyboard, organ and accordion, began the song over the summer.

“I wrote down Yeti words and then, I wrote down our expectations in my notebook,” Wariner said. “I already had a tune in my head, so I wrote out some lyrics and just started singing acapella to a voice memo. I sent it to my husband to see if he thought it was any good. When he said yes, he liked it, so we got together.”

Her husband, who majored in jazz guitar at Utah State University, is used to collaborating with Wariner as they performed in the band, Arkansas Travelers, back in the day. Their daughter and her boyfriend joined them in the family recording studio. Together, they added chords, chord progressions on keyboard and electric guitar.

“We worked on it and had a lot of different iterations for about a week, every day,” she said. “The song is part of the school's identity; it's the culture you want to build. It’s eternal. So, I worked on it some every day. I knew we wanted to include our expectations in it. It was difficult paring down the words so I kept working on it.”

The school expectations include respectful, responsible and making safe choices.

“I asked Jeni to think about everything that we wanted to build here at Glacier Hills and then tie in the Yetis, so the song summarizes who we want to be,” Winfree said. “It’s catchy. It’s appealing to kids because it is energetic and exciting and will bring about school spirit. We were talking about doing a cheer and a song, but then she kind of put them together and it ends with that. She’s just super creative.”

That’s because the achievement coach, who not only was a former band member, Wariner also was a cheerleader.

The school song ends with the cheer: “Glacier Hills, that's our school! Yetis make learning cool!”

The chorus also spells out the mascot: “Y-E-T-I, Yes, I’m Yeti. Y-E-T-I for learning, we are read!”

The “Glacier Hills Song” was finished in July and the faculty and staff sang it at the ribbon-cutting in August.

“The song is lively and upbeat and more modern than some of the other songs,” Wariner said. “It’s fun and exciting seeing it sung.”