You can”™t kill music.
That”™s what the owners of the School of Rock in Fairfield and New Canaan are learning as they consider adding a third school to their repertoire.
Stephen Kennedy and Tony Reilly are seeing the growth of their enrollment is inversely proportional to the declining arts and music programs in public schools.
There are more than 140 students enrolled at the School of Rock in Fairfield, a music school that teaches children seven to 17 as well as adults how to wail on guitar, bass, drums, keys and vocals while imparting lessons on the legends of rock. The school has opened a location in New Canaan and is looking for an appropriate space in Greenwich and hopes to have total of five in Fairfield County before moving north in Connecticut.
Kennedy and Reilly have exclusive rights to opening the schools in Connecticut. They were the first franchisees to open schools last year when Reilly a former editor and publisher, and Kennedy an advertising sales executive, were on the hunt for a second-life career.
The Fairfield location is on Post Road and the new school neighbors New Canaan Racquet Club on Grove Street.
The school founder Paul Green, a former music producer, launched the first school in 1998 in Philadelphia. School of Rock later inspired the 2003 movie of the same name starring Jack Black. There are about 70 locations nationwide.
The company was bought last year by Westport-based Sterling Equity Partners, an equity investment company that specializes in educational businesses across the country including the Sylvan Learning Centers, the early success story of Sterling. The firm bought Sylvan in 1991 for $3 million, and took it public two years later. Sterling reacquired Sylvan when it took Educate Inc. private along with Citigroup Private Equity in 2007.
Shoshana Vernick, principal of Sterling, said the School of Rock fits with the pro-learning environment Sterling is interested in investing in.
“There”™s a mission there to keep musicianship alive in rock music, especially in an era of American Idol and electronically-backed one-hit wonders,” Vernick said. “Our belief is the company can revolutionize the way music is taught in America.”
Typical public school budgets cut about $75,000 each year from arts, music and cultural programs, according to the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. State Department.
As part of the curriculum, students take 45-minute private lessons with instructors, all of who are active rock musicians and play multiple instruments and participate in three-hour rehearsals with students. Rehearsals prepare students for a concert at semester”™s end at a venue such as Two Boots in Bridgeport.
Though the school has no ill will toward the likes of Chopin and Mozart, the greats here are Clapton, Page and Richards, and each semester, students delve into an extensive catalog of rock greats and genres. Current sessions at the Fairfield location have groups preparing to play songs from Van Halen, Queen, The Cars and a group focusing on “women who rock.”
“One of Paul Green”™s mantras is we don”™t learn to play, we play to learn,” Reilly said. “The element of live performance instills a level of confidence that is often lost in private lessons.”
The performance package costs $325 for a 14-week session including weekly lessons, band practice and a final concert. The school does offer lessons-only programs for beginners, which are about $250. There are also programs in both areas for adults.
“Students are so devoted because they learn to play songs they know and like, as opposed to just traditional chords and sheet music,” Kennedy said. “Our prices are very affordable; if you”™ve paid for tutoring of any kind you can see that. These are also songs, groups and stories that the parents know and love. In a lot of ways it”™s for the parents as much as the kids, many parents would love to see their child play a Stones song, or lay into a Van Halen solo. The engagement is there; it”™s a pretty amazing process, and in a short period of time these kids really can become players.”
Kennedy said that parents also have a very high awareness that school music programs are nowhere near what they once were.
“Schools have to watch their budgets, but parents will still spend money on their kids first,” Reilly said. “Even in such an affluent area, a lot of the music and arts programs in the schools are not what they once were. We fit the niche that”™s missing and have been very fortunate to parallel a time when a program like this is sought out and really appreciated.”
Kennedy said if schools were spending more on arts and culture the School of Rock might not have had the same kind of wave of success that is allowing them to expand so quickly.
“Timing is everything, whatever you do in business,” Kennedy said.
