NORTON SHORES, MI – Shawn Lawton, the longtime choir director at Mona Shores High School, has announced he will retire next year after three decades leading the school’s choir program.
Lawton, 58, who has served as choir director since 1993, will step down at the end of the 2024-25 school year, he announced Thursday, April 11. He is retiring alongside his wife, Mona Shores musical director and choreographer Molly Lawton, who has been working at the high school with him for 30 years.
As Mona Shores Director of Choirs, Shawn Lawton leads the school’s beloved Singing Christmas Tree production, the massive annual show that kicks off the holiday season for thousands of families across West Michigan each year.
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Lawton said leading the annual Christmas production, which draws nearly 7,000 viewers each year, has been the experience of a lifetime.
“It just overwhelms me every year, when I just look out and there’s not a seat in that theater that is not filled,” he told MLive/Muskegon Chronicle Friday, April 12. “It just made me very proud to be a part of the program and just know that we’re creating this thing with this whole community of parents and students... It’s just been an enormous point of pride for me, to be able to be in charge of that project.”
Lawton said he and his wife are finally ready to retire now that their children are almost out of college, and while they can spend more time with his parents.
He is also ready to step back from the “demanding” nature of the job now while he still has the energy to give it his all, rather than waiting until he’s burnt out, Lawton said.
“As I think you can imagine, being in charge of, and doing the Mona Shores Choir program justice, is beyond demanding,” he explained in a letter to choir students, posted online. “In the way that we did it, It’s all consuming. It’s not just coming to school and teaching 4 classes and going home. It’s nights, weekends, vacation and summer times too.”
“We want to go out while we’ve still got some skin in the game, not when we absolutely dread coming to school.”
Lawton said he has cherished being able to work with students and help them find their voice through the choir program, which he called the “crown jewel” of Mona Shores.
“The number of students that I have seen just fall in love with the arts and music here, or the social life here that we create around the choir – they just find a home here, and I think that that is something I’m really proud of,” he said.
Along with leading the school’s annual Singing Christmas Tree production, Lawton said one of his favorite parts of the job has been taking the choir on overseas trips every four years. His best memory was taking students to Brazil in 2005, where he said the students were treated like “rockstars.”
“It was just an absolutely incredible experience, because Brazil didn’t get a lot of American choirs touring there at that time,” he recalled. “We would do a concert and afterwards, everybody wanted us to sign their t-shirts and we packed the houses and they would chant.”
This summer, Lawton will take the choir on his final overseas trip to South Africa, he said.
Another highlight of working in the school’s choir program has been the incredible support from the Mona Shores administration, parents and broader community, Lawton said.
“I just can’t imagine not teaching here,” he said.
Lawton is waiting to retire until the end of the next school year so that he can help the next choir director transition into the job, he said. The school has already posted the job online, and Lawton will “team-teach” with his successor next year so he can show them the ropes and ensure a smooth transition for the program.
Shawn Lawton has worked in music education for 35 years. After earning his music teaching degree at Western Michigan University, he worked as a student teacher at Mona Shores for a few years before he moved to Chicago to live with Molly Lawton, who he had met at WMU.
In 1993, he was offered a job as the choir director at Mona Shores and the couple moved back to West Michigan, where they have remained ever since.
Molly Lawton is the director and choreographer of Mona Shores’s Allegros Musical and Pop Go the Sailors shows. She earned her degree in musical theater from WMU.
Together, Shawn and Molly Lawton have three children: Jonny, 29, who is a music teacher at Reeths-Puffer Public Schools; Meghan, 25, who works for Grand Haven Area Public Schools; and Jess, 20, who is a senior at WMU earning her music teaching degree.
