KC charter school builds brains with music, with help from national program

"Bennie Walsh knew the word he was trying to pull out of his head.
“It was like I was sitting right in a … um … um ...”" reports Joe Robertson, The Kansas City Star.

Photo: The Kansas City Star

The 9-year-old third-grader was trying to describe what it was like to step into a small classroom for the first time to the startling sight of 25 piano keyboards in neat rows.
Sean Saunders knows the feeling.

Saunders is the third-year principal of the small Hope Leadership Academy charter school at 2800 E. Linwood Blvd.

He felt the same wonder in November 2013, on a tour of New Orleans schools, when he came upon a similar sight in one classroom.

What is this? He had to know.

Because in that moment, as a principal wanting to nurture a fine arts-based elementary school for children in some of Kansas City’s highest-poverty neighborhoods, he was imagining what it would mean to kids like Bennie.

“It was like I was sitting…” Bennie smiled as the word came to him.

“… in a symphony.”

What Saunders had stumbled upon in New Orleans was one of the more than 130 schools in the nation — most of them in New York City — that had won grants from the nonprofit Music and the Brain program.
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Source: The Kansas City Star