Glen Rose principal enjoys day job, pursues country-music dream

Jeremy Hughes was named president of the Arkadelphia Chamber of Commerce Board for 2018 in January. Hughes, who works for Shelter Insurance, said the goal for his term is to continue to help the chamber grow its membership by being active in the community.
Jeremy Hughes was named president of the Arkadelphia Chamber of Commerce Board for 2018 in January. Hughes, who works for Shelter Insurance, said the goal for his term is to continue to help the chamber grow its membership by being active in the community.

Glen Rose Elementary School is full of dreamers. Count principal Trey Stevens as one of them. The 35-year-old career educator spends his free time writing country music, hoping to compose Nashville’s next big hit.

“I have always tried to instill that in my kids,” Stevens said. “When people come to one of my shows, they are shocked that I am an elementary principal. My whole career, people at school have been shocked to find out I am a songwriter, and I play music. I incorporate it into every school I have been in and take the guitar into classrooms and play and let the kids strum the guitar. The kids know the passion and drive are there, and I really try to push for them to find something they enjoy that would be a nice hobby that would be fun to do and fun to chase.”

Co-writing the song “Playing With Fire,” which receives regular air play on SiriusXM station The Highway, has motivated Stevens to continue to write as his education career continues to prosper with his first principal job this school year.

“‘Playing With Fire’ was really cool because it would come on The Highway, and then a Garth Brooks song would come on after it,” Stevens said. “Knowing I co-wrote that was a really good feeling. I am just looking to do that again.”

Stevens’ father was in the natural-gas business, so Stevens spent his childhood on the move. He was born in Malvern and went to kindergarten at the school he works in at Glen Rose, but the family moved on to West Virginia, then Wyoming, Mississippi and Kansas. Stevens spent his high school years in the Texas panhandle near Amarillo.

He enjoyed country music, especially Garth Brooks, but sports was his main passion. He played football and basketball and ran track. He also realized he really liked being around kids. On every home football game day, he and his teammates visited elementary school classes and ate lunch with the students. The players brought their helmets and interacted with the students while they ate lunch. Later, Stevens was enrolled in the Future Texas Teachers program and was assigned to teach that same kindergarten class the final period of the school day.

“I decided right then, I was going to be a kindergarten teacher,” Stevens said. “It never worked out for me to teach kindergarten kids, but I have been involved with elementary kids.”

After two years of junior college, Stevens enrolled at the University of Texas A&M-Commerce, where he majored in elementary education. College is also where he developed a passion for the guitar and paid attention to the popular songs of the Texas country artists of the time.

“I picked it up and just pushed myself to keep playing every day,” he said.

Stevens’ foray into education came at St. Rita Catholic School, a private elementary school in north Dallas.

In the meantime, Stevens’ father and two younger brothers had settled back in Glen Rose. Stevens felt the pull to come back to Arkansas to be closer to them.

Stevens accepted an elementary teaching job at Haskell Harmony Grove in 2008 and helped the late legendary Coach Jimmy “Red” Parker start the high school football program there. Parker, formerly a coach at Clemson University, along with many other college and high school stints, was a great mentor to Stevens. Ironically, he also helped boost Stevens’ songwriting career.

Parker was friends with Jim Ed Brown, an Arkansas native who, with his sisters, achieved country music fame with the group the Browns, then later moved on to a solo career.

Parker knew Stevens had a passion for country music and called on his friend Brown to give Stevens advice.

The two had lunch, and Brown asked Stevens if he wanted to be a singer or a songwriter. Stevens told him, whichever “I can make it in.” When Brown found out Stevens was 29, he said, “If you are going to be an artist, you better hurry.”

So that made up Stevens’ mind. He was going to concentrate on songwriting. With encouragement from Parker, his parents and wife, Rebecca, Stevens moved his family of four to Nashville in 2013 to pursue songwriting. The move wasn’t entirely risky, though, as he secured an assistant-principal job at an elementary school. In the midst of chasing his dream, Stevens actually furthered his education career.

For three years, he worked during the day and honed his songwriting skills at night. Thanks to Brown, he met some high-profile songwriters and took “about a year to network.”

After three years, his kids were asking about moving back to Arkansas. He knew it was the right thing to do, and the assistant-principal job at Collegeville Elementary School in Bryant was open.

Stevens felt at ease about the move until he was on the road.

“We got halfway to Arkansas, and I got a call the song I had written was getting cut,” he said. “That was perfect timing. The house was up for selling, and we were on the road with everything packed.”

In Nashville, Stevens met singer/songwriter Jay Michael Harter. They co-wrote Harter’s comeback single “Playing With Fire.”

“We got moved back to Arkansas, and it was playing on SiriusXM,” Stevens said. “That was a good feeling. Coming back, I felt better about the three years I was there. That’s not very normal to cut a song like that in that short amount of time.”

If the call had come a little earlier, Stevens may have stayed in Nashville longer but was comforted by the fact that he can write music anywhere.

Stevens continues to write music and plays most every weekend, including regular gigs at Rod’s Pizza Cellar in Hot Springs.

“I am constantly playing the guitar, and if something comes to me, I pick it up and start writing and playing,”

he said.

In his time back in Arkansas, Stevens made one of his other dreams come true last fall when he took his first elementary principal job at the school he started kindergarten in.

“It is very surreal,” he said. “When this position opened and I applied, one of the big things on my mind was coming full circle. Once I got started, the first thing I did was walk through the kindergarten building. It was a nostalgic feeling of that being so long ago and me being so young, but still some of those senses coming back and remembering that year. It’s a big thing for me because I want to use that for our kids here to know I was right where they are at one point. I may have been in the exact same classroom, so they can do the same things.”

Stevens said he knows he’s lucky. He and Rebecca have a wonderful family — Makayla, 13, Kaitlyn, 11, and Liam, 9 — and he has forged a successful career in education and still manages to hang on to the dream of making it big in country music.

“I feel I am at home and love it here at the elementary,” he said. “My biggest goal in education is to help these students succeed and to move forward to help our school become the best it can be statewide, nationally. Musicwise, I play pretty much every weekend somewhere. I write constantly. I always pull out the guitar when an idea hits. I don’t think that will ever go away.

“I don’t know if I will have a major cut or if something will happen down the line. I don’t like to stress or focus on that because I don’t want it to feel like a job. My ultimate goal would be to get a song or two out with a major artist and still be here leading the school, doing what I love around the elementary school teachers and students.”

Upcoming Events