I have served as the Executive Director and Co-Founder of the High School for Recording Arts Los Angeles, which operated during the 2018-2019 academic year in Los Angeles, CA and has relaunched for the 2023-24 academic year under the name of Studio 4 LA. We began with a modest grant from the NewSchools Venture Fund, which enabled us to pilot in 2017. This led to a NewSchools Invent Grant, a Great Public Schools Now Development grant, and the opportunity to operate a WASC-certified program in Downtown Los Angeles in collaboration with the YouthBuild Charter School of California. Today, we operate with partnership with the YouthBuild Charter School of California and funding from the Yass Prize.
Over the 2018-19 school year we doubled our average attendance, tripled our enrollment and graduated 100% of our seniors. We visited some of the worlds most famous recording studios and received masterclasses from D Smoke (Netflix Rhythm & Flow Winner, NAACP Award Nominee), Sickamore (A&R for Travis Scott and Senior VP of A&R at Interscope Records), The OG Arabian Prince (original member of NWA), and Yves Mathieu East (activist and supermodel). Our students performed as the keynote performers during the 2019 Deeper Learning Conference at High Tech High in San Diego, CA and received standing ovations for their original musical compositions.
We also established a partnership with the state of California through the federal Workforce Innovation and Opportunities Act to pay our students for 2 hours a day to act as executives in their own, student-run record label. This partnership has been replicated by our flagship school in St. Paul, MN, High School for Recording Arts. My article, “How to pay your students to go to school,” in the McGill Journal of Education covers this work and can be found under the “Writing & Speaking” tab.
Since then, our work to support schools, districts, and states to implement and incorporate best practices from the High School for Recording Arts on behalf of student wellbeing has expanded under a new non-profit called 4 Learning, a 501(c)3 I co-founded with my mentors David “TC” Ellis and Tony Simmons. We support schools and districts in establishing their recording arts for education programs, build recording studios with a focus on pedagogical practices, and establish school systems that foster lifelong learners in culturally sustaining ways. Check out the journey of HSRA LA below.
