What a difference a home makes

Leila Navidi

Nevada School of the Arts students rehearse for a performance with the Las Vegas Philharmonic at the rededication of the historic Fifth Street School, the music school’s new home.

By Kristen Peterson (contact)

Friday, Sept. 26, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Leila Navidi

Nevada School of the Arts violin student Michael Kwok, 12, pauses during rehearsal Monday in one of the new practice rooms at the Fifth Street School in downtown Las Vegas.

The Nevada School of the Arts has sent talented students into the world, built a nurturing community, taught musicians who didn’t have money and forged lifelong relationships.

It’s an impressive feat for a 31-year-old nomadic community school that was operating out of a business park before moving into the downtown Fifth Street School last month.

So what does it mean to finally have a home?

Everything, really: theory classes, recital space, a courtyard for small events and an $85,000 donation that bought three baby grand pianos and outfitted a piano lab.

Its new home means paying only $1 a year in rent to the city, a particularly good deal for the nonprofit private school, which operates on a shoestring budget of $650,000 a year.

More than anything, the new location in the downtown Fifth Street School — just two blocks from the Las Vegas Academy — gives the school an identity.

“This school needed to have a face,” says Shakeh Ghoukasian, its dean and a violinist with the Las Vegas Philharmonic. “We’ve always had the students and a wonderful faculty, but we’ve never had the home to take it further. It’s all coming forward now. We’re really trying to raise the level of what’s being offered.”

Nevada School of the Arts trains students in classical music through private lessons, classes, workshops, recitals, Suzuki programs and ensembles. It offers a family music program for infants and toddlers.

Its more than 300 students come from diverse backgrounds. Some are home-schooled. Others are inner-city students, children from affluent families or children attending through financial scholarships.

Some are pursuing music careers — two of the school’s alums are studying at the Eastman School of Music. One is getting his master’s in violin performance at the Cincinnati School of Music. Other students are seeking enrichment.

About half of the 37 part- and full-time teachers offer classes and lessons at the school. Some are college professors, schoolteachers or musicians in the Las Vegas Philharmonic. Before moving into Fifth Street School, a renovated former grammar school that was built in 1936, most of the teachers taught from their homes.

“The Fifth Street School has given the program new life,” says cello teacher Robin Reinarz, who has nearly 40 students in the program and teaches at the school five days a week. “My group classes have a new electricity to them because the students are excited to be there. We feel a part of the school. As time goes on, we will have more of a sense of ‘This is our home.’ ”

Reinarz was a Suzuki parent with the Nevada School of the Arts before she began teaching there in 1995. Both of her children took violin lessons at the school. Her son, James, continued lessons there through high school and is now a senior at the Cleveland Institute of Music.

Longevity with the Nevada School of the Arts is not unusual. Reinarz has high school students who have been with her since elementary school.

Micheal Rompel-Cardin has been taking cello lessons with Reinarz since he was in sixth grade. He attends the Las Vegas Academy and is looking at colleges in the Southwest where he can pursue a music education, says his grandmother, Brenda Cardin. Another grandson, Jaeger Cardin, takes violin lessons at the school.

“I can’t think of any better place for children to take lessons,” she says. “The teachers are dedicated and they know what they’re doing because a lot of them are schoolteachers or play in the Philharmonic.

“You get a feeling teachers are not just teaching them how to play. There are a lot of life lessons too.”

Cardin says the new location will create more of a hub for the parents and grandparents of students who attend the school.

The school’s new home also means it can reach out to the community with more public events and a brown bag concert series (starting next month) and return to an art program that combines visual and performing art.

Local philanthropist Bernice Fischer, who gave the $85,000 to the school when she heard it needed new instruments for its new space, says she did so because there is a need for children to be more involved in the arts: “Children need to be encouraged to read and study and to know what’s going on in the world. I believe in education of all kinds.”