Lucinda Cindy Busler

Lucinda "Cindy" Busler was born on November 19, 1955, in Ohio, to Sandra Jane Simmons Busler and John Ralph Busler. Raised on a small farm in Carrollton, Ohio, she grew up alongside her sister Susan in a household centered on agricultural pursuits that would profoundly shape her character and work ethic. The Busler family farm specialized in raising and showing Shropshire and Hampshire sheep, and from an early age, Cindy and Susan engaged in the demanding work of fitting and showing sheep across county fairs in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Demonstrating remarkable entrepreneurial initiative, the two sisters financed their college educations through the proceeds generated from their sheep fitting and showing activities. This self-directed approach to funding higher education reflected both economic necessity and the strong work ethic cultivated in farming communities. Cindy graduated from Carrollton High School in 1973, during a time when the nation was experiencing significant educational expansion and increased emphasis on vocational and agricultural education programs.

Following her secondary education, Cindy attended The Ohio State University, where she pursued an ambitious dual-degree program. Her first degree, conferred in the summer of 1977, was a Bachelor of Science in Rural Sociology and Agricultural Education. Recognizing her growing passion for music and the performing arts, she remained at Ohio State to pursue an additional degree in Music and Theater, which she completed in 1979. This intellectual pivot demonstrated both academic flexibility and personal courage in following a passion that diverged from her initial educational focus.

Upon completing her degrees, Cindy returned to Carrollton to begin her teaching career. From 1979 to 1980, she taught vocational agriculture, directly applying the expertise she had developed through her family farm work and college studies. During this period, vocational agriculture education in the United States was experiencing persistent teacher shortages despite continued demand. The following years, from 1981 to 1983, witnessed Cindy's transition to music education in the Carrollton school system, reflecting her growing recognition that music was her true calling.

In 1981, at the height of her early teaching career, Cindy was selected for a prestigious Rotary Fellowship to study music at the University of Edmonton in Alberta, Canada. This recognition reflected both her academic distinction and her emerging reputation as a musician of considerable promise. The fellowship provided advanced instruction in music education and performance, occurring at the exact moment when she was transitioning from agricultural education to music as her primary professional identity.

In the summer of 1983, Cindy undertook what she described as "the adventure of a lifetime," packing her worldly possessions and moving to the Pacific Northwest with her sister Susan. The sisters initially settled in the Federal Way area, a suburban community located south of Seattle in King County, Washington. Once settled in Washington, Cindy began a peripatetic teaching career that carried her across multiple school districts in the Puget Sound region, taking teaching positions in the Federal Way, Highline, Puyallup, Kelso, and Auburn school districts.

Across all of these positions, she taught kindergarten through twelfth-grade music and drama. Her teaching reputation became specifically renowned for two particular specializations: her creative plays and musicals that engaged students and audiences throughout the region, and her expertise in working with the adolescent male voice, a specialized pedagogical area that requires understanding of vocal physiology and the particular challenges of voice change in male youth.

While maintaining her full-time teaching responsibilities, Cindy pursued advanced credentials and graduate education. She obtained a master's degree in Music Education from Pacific Lutheran University, where her recital work featured specifically the works of female composers of the Pacific Northwest. During the 1980s and 1990s, female composers remained significantly underrepresented in professional orchestral programming and classical recital venues. By choosing to feature Pacific Northwest female composers in her recital work, Cindy was actively working to counteract this systemic underrepresentation and promote regional artistic culture.

Beyond her master's degree in music education, Cindy pursued additional professional certifications, qualifying for an administrator certificate and obtaining a reading endorsement. She served as Director of Huntington Learning Center in Tacoma for two years, bringing her educational expertise into a specialized tutoring context that allowed her to influence educational outcomes beyond traditional classroom settings.

Cindy's commitment to lifelong learning culminated in 2017 when she completed her Doctor of Education degree in Curriculum and Instruction from Capella University. Her doctoral dissertation focused specifically on Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) as a systematic approach for managing challenging behaviors in educational settings. Her research contributed to a growing body of scholarship on PBIS implementation, particularly focusing on how such systems could effectively support students with the most challenging behavioral presentations.

Beyond her formal teaching and administrative roles, Cindy became deeply embedded in the musical and cultural life of the Puget Sound region through her extensive volunteer work as a music director and conductor. She directed numerous church choirs throughout her decades in the Pacific Northwest—so many that her obituary notes she participated in "way too many church choirs to list over many decades". Most prominently, Cindy served as director of the Rainier Chorale for over seven years. The Rainier Chorale, founded in the fall of 1982 by Marilee Plaks and Ken Duley to perform Handel's Messiah with the Rainier Symphony, had evolved into a popular and respected community chorus by the time Cindy assumed its directorship. Under her leadership, the Rainier Chorale achieved sufficient recognition to perform at The Metropolitan Opera in New York City.

Throughout her career, spanning more than four decades, Cindy taught voice lessons to private students, maintaining a parallel career as a vocal instructor even while holding full-time positions in school districts. Private voice instruction represents one of the most time-intensive and pedagogically demanding aspects of music education, and her four-decade commitment to private instruction indicated both personal discipline and genuine passion for individual student development.

Continuing the animal husbandry interests that had defined her childhood, Cindy spent over two decades raising and showing Labrador retrievers, transferring the expertise and passion for competitive animal showing from her youth into work with this popular breed. Her years of experience showing and judging sheep, combined with her extensive knowledge of Labrador retriever breeding and showing, made her a sought-after resource for the Puget Sound Labrador Retriever Association. She contributed expertise to the association's dog show events by serving as a judge and helping with the organization of shows.

Most significantly, Cindy's expertise in animal work extended into professional educational territory. She "proved to be quite talented with dogs" and spent several years taking a break from formal classroom teaching to work with Pet Partners. Pet Partners, formerly known as the Delta Society, was founded in Portland, Oregon in 1977 as the Delta Foundation to conduct research on the human-animal bond. During her work with Pet Partners, Cindy made a significant professional contribution by helping to develop a national curriculum for their companion pet assistance dogs' program. This curriculum development work positioned her alongside other educators and animal professionals working to standardize training and certification across the United States for animals involved in therapeutic and assistive roles.

As her mother Sandra Jane Simmons Busler's health began to decline during the early 2010s, Cindy faced the increasingly common challenge of balancing ongoing professional responsibilities with family caregiving obligations. In 2013, she made the decision to take early retirement from her teaching position in Washington. Upon retiring, Cindy relocated to Oregon and moved in with her sister Susan in Dallas, Oregon. In Oregon, Cindy and Susan undertook the responsibility of caring for their mother as her cognitive decline accelerated. Their mother passed away on November 20, 2021, from complications of Lewy Body dementia, with her daughters providing care until the end.

Following her mother's death in 2021, Cindy's own health began to deteriorate progressively. The arthritis, shoulder problems, knee difficulties, and diabetes that had accumulated over her decades of physical labor—both in her youth on the farm and in her adult years with animal showing—increasingly compromised her mobility and quality of life. By 2023, she had become homebound, and in 2024, she was moved into a professional care facility to receive the specialized support her medical conditions required.

Despite these physical challenges, Cindy maintained her cognitive engagement and emotional connections until late in her illness. She sustained her health until Thanksgiving 2025, when her condition began to deteriorate rapidly. On Friday, March 20, 2026, at age seventy, Cindy Busler died in Oregon. She was cremated at her request, and in accordance with her wishes, no memorial service was held.

Throughout her life, Cindy maintained her Ohio identity despite spending more than forty years in the Pacific Northwest. She remained an Ohio State Buckeyes fan to the very end of her life, maintaining this institutional and geographic loyalty across her entire adult lifespan. The Busler family memorial, established through the Stark Community Foundation in Canton, Ohio, reflects Cindy's deep connections to her original Ohio community. The family chose to establish a scholarship program for older-than-average students returning to pursue further education—a fitting memorial that honors Cindy's lifetime commitment to educational advancement and her recognition that learning happens across the lifespan.