In January, 2017, a friend told Frances Burns about Keys 2 Success and added, “You should volunteer.” Frances was skeptical. “The idea of me teaching piano seemed ludicrous,” she remembers.
But Frances did have several years of experience as an elementary school teacher, before her own children were born . She did play piano (“a little,” she says). And she had volunteered in Newark in the past, in a language program for adults. So location was not a barrier. It was also a time, following the 2016 election, when she felt the need to find a new way to get engaged in the community. “I was asking myself, Well what could I do? All these factors dovetailed.”
So she agreed to do as her friend suggested and talk with Jee-Hoon Krska, the founder and director of K2S. “We met over coffee, and in about an hour-and-a-half she had me totally convinced.”
Ms. Krska recalled that when Frances joined, K2S was relatively new, and both the program structure, the staff and the students were still forming. “We were in the old South Street School, literally in a closet,” she recalled. The space was hot and crowded, the children would get agitated and “it was very crazy”. Another class next door would sometimes show videos with loud music, competing with the piano lessons. The equipment didn’t work perfectly. The heat could become unbearable. Frances remembers, “I’d leave, drenched in sweat, thinking ‘Remind me: Why are we doing this?’”
But she kept coming back, week after week--and now, year after year--to the K2S classes. “There were some days it was really good, some days the kids would come in and practice, and play together as a group, and I’d think, ‘Wow: This is working.’” Frances felt she couldn’t leave a brand new program like Keys 2 Success after only a few months; it wouldn’t be fair. So she stayed on, volunteering once a week. By June, the students and the program seemed to be coalescing.
That summer, K2S held its first student concert. “The parents came, and the kids performed,” Frances recounted. “And I remember that with my kids, when I’d go to their school concerts, and they loved it. And the Keys Kids loved it, too. They all dressed up, and their parents took pictures. It was very heartening.”
Frances was also inspired by how Ms. Krska worked with the students. “There were times I’d ask, ‘Do we need this child in the program?’ Because some of the kids were really disruptive. One child had vision problems--he literally couldn’t read the music. But Jee-Hoon never gave up on a student. She did insist that they come to class, and once they’d quit they couldn’t come back in. But the ones who stayed, she never gave up.”
One young student comes to mind as an example. She was a second-grader who “cried every day,” Frances remembered. She would shut down, as Ms. Krska puts it, “and we didn’t understand why.” As it turned out, this little girl had some learning differences, and school was very stressful. It was difficult to teach her--but she could learn, on her own, wearing headphones to block out the sounds from the other students. In 2020, when the children were learning an arrangement of “Simple Gifts” for a planned joint concert with the Baroque Orchestra of New Jersey (BONJ), Jee-Hoon offered her the piece of music and encouraged her to try it. “Our arrangement for ‘Simple Gifts’ was not simple! Most of the kids were learning just the melody, with a few advanced students learning the harmony. But she came in the next day and could play the whole thing, on her own.”
In 2018, South Street School moved to a new building, and K2S had more space. Equipment donations came in. The program itself improved as instruction evolved from all-group to more individualized learning. The classroom became more orderly. Ms. Krska was able to hire staff members who’d grown up in Newark themselves, and connected with the children immediately. As younger children entered the program, they could see the older children actually playing and reading music; perhaps they imagined themselves being able to play like that third-grader. “They could see the goal,” Frances said.
Developing a program that really works takes time, Ms. Krska noted. Developing trust with the children so the classroom functions well, finding and hiring good teachers, and investing in those teachers, all takes time. “It’s a point that’s lost on a lot of people,” she noted. “They’ll ask, ‘Why can’t you use all volunteers?’ We need volunteers, but we also need skilled staff.”
Frances remembers the impact that hiring a Spanish-speaking teacher had on the kids. “He could speak to the kids in their language, so they connected on a different level. And when Elijah [featured in our November newsletter] was hired, the kids really looked up to both of them. I think for the boys in particular, it had a huge impact,” she recalls. “The kids really like them, but they also really respect them.”
One theme that Ms. Krska emphasizes as the Executive Director is connecting communities: “Yes, we’re teaching children music, but we’re also using music to create bridges between groups of people who don’t typically know each other, and we need each other. We’re both better for the connection,” she has said. Frances observed the process first-hand, when the “Keys Kids” played during the intermission at a concert by the Baroque Orchestra of New Jersey (BONJ), a much-appreciated partner.
“Many people in the audience were older people--which is what classical music tends to attract,” Frances explained. “They loved seeing the kids, and listening to them play. One gentleman came up to me at the end of the concert and said, ‘I wanted to see the children perform before I decided to support you. Now I want to talk to you.’” In the live interaction through music, the young musicians from Newark and the older audience from surrounding communities come a bit closer together.
That same reciprocity is what keeps Frances so engaged. “I still like to learn piano. I’ll never be a musician, but I do enjoy playing a little. And honestly, the kids inspire me! Jee-Hoon always talks about ‘the two-way street.’ And these kids inspire me to stay at it. Because they stay at it.”
