Meet our 2025 MusiCounts Teacher of the Year nominees — last but certainly not least: Emily Dominey from Hamilton, ON.

The MusiCounts Teacher of the Year Award, presented by Anthem Entertainment, is happily celebrating its 20th anniversary recognizing and honouring exceptional Canadian music teachers each year.

Tune in to the 2025 JUNO Awards on Sunday, March 30 where the winner will be announced, and on our website & social media platforms @MusiCounts.

What is the music program like at your school? And how did MusiCounts make an impact on those programs?

Our music program at Dundas Valley Secondary is primarily an instrumental focus. So we have a junior band, senior band, jazz band, percussion ensemble, and then we also have a music council. We also have a special education music program specifically, which is conducted in a rock band style, it's pretty cool.

We perform at various events at our school like for our Remembrance Day assembly, we perform in our community, I had kids this year play out in -10° weather downtown Dundas spreading some holiday cheer, but we also do some large scale concerts twice a year, and some casual events like coffee houses. So different opportunities for different styles of performances.

We have a great relationship with our elementary feeder school, so every December we go out and do a tour. We visit every single elementary school and play a concert for them. Then we also host a one-day, big band camp where all the elementaries come to us and we do sectionals with all the different instrument groups, and then play in a big mass band which is always fun.

We always run about 10 to 12 different fundraisers a year to help subsidize costs for trips and music fest nationals. We're doing a large-scale trip to Halifax this year, which is exciting.

Another exciting thing about our school this year is we're the associate school for our local Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra, which is very exciting because we get to do some different events with them. We had a brass quintet come out to our retreat and perform for them. We also get some sectionals led by them, and we even get to play at one of those concerts during an intermission coming up in May, which is super exciting!

So MusiCounts obviously played a great impact in being able to get to do all these things. My first year was three years ago, and I think we barely had enough working instruments to accommodate the small group of students that we had. That was the first “regular” school year after the pandemic. As we know, every music program probably took a hit during the pandemic. So we started small, but then the next year it grew and almost doubled, which was amazing. But then I was like, “I have nothing! I don't have enough instruments for these students!” We still have some instruments, like about 50 or so, that are either unplayable or sitting, waiting to get funding so that we can repair them so that they can get back in rotation. Most of our instruments in our inventory are from the 1960s, so as you can imagine, trying to play an old relic of an instrument is very difficult. So getting some new ones in the rotation has been just awesome, and it's been super essential to our music-making here.

What does it mean to you to be nominated for the 2025 MusiCounts Teacher of the Year Award?

I’m honestly in shock and was overwhelmed when I got that phone call. I think it's just super amazing that a student and a colleague of mine thought of me to put forward a nomination. I'm very thankful for the opportunity to experience everything with MusiCounts, because they have been an essential part of my whole career — not just at Dundas Valley, but I've gotten grants for Bernie Custis and Henderson, which are two other schools I worked at in my career, which made the same kind of great impact that it has at Dundas Valley. I feel like they're just such a big part of what has helped me in my career, so it's really cool to experience this with them and I'm just very grateful, in awe and excited.

Do you have a music teacher or mentor that has inspired you?

I have a mentor that was very inspiring to me. She's the reason why I decided to become a music teacher. Her name is Robin Meyer at Saltfleet District High School and she's still there, she's a colleague in my school board now. So she came to Saltfleet, which was my alma mater, when I was in grade 12. When I was in high school, our music program had no consistency. I had a different music teacher every year. There wasn't as much going on really because of that, but when she came to our school, she just brought so much energy and passion. We got to do field trips, we got to do performances, and we were actually a part of the school community. And that's something that just really resonated with me.

I studied private piano most of my life, so I knew I wanted to do something with music, but it was really having Robin at Saltfleet that really ignited the love for band, and the collaborative music-making. I'm also just so grateful to her because she was a monumental part of my life, throughout not just high school, but as I started teaching. When I was in university too, I wasn't sure if I wanted to go into teaching or not. I was in my fourth year of university, and I actually reached out to her and I said, "Hey, can I come observe your class and maybe just see if this is something that kind of fits with me?” And she was like, “Yeah, come on in!” So, I did some volunteering with her, observed her teach, got to help some students out with different band instruments, and then I was kind of like, “Okay, I think this is something that I really want to do”. I was so lucky because when I first started teaching and got hired by the HWSB, I worked my first LTO job at Saltfleet with Robin, which was amazing! I got more mentorship as a first year teacher from my “music icon”, so it was just really really awesome. To this day, 15 years later, we still have lots of conversations and collaborate because often in our school board at least, you're the only music teacher at the school. So it's really important to have those cross-school colleagues that you can collaborate with and get advice from.

That's amazing to hear! What are you looking forward to doing at the 2025 JUNO Awards in Vancouver?

I am looking forward to Michael Bublé [laughs] no, he is one of my favourites. But honestly, I'm just excited. I've never been to Vancouver before other than the airport, which I don't think really counts, so I'm just excited to see a completely different part of our country. I'm just excited to take in all the different events that are happening at the JUNO Awards, to hear awesome music live because live music is amazing, and just to meet the other nominees and ask them what their programs are like in different parts of Canada, and what advice they might have for me as well. Excited to celebrate MusiCounts because again, like I said before, they're just a monumental part of my career so far, so I’d like to thank them and experience everything with them.

*Interview condensed for readability.