St. Paul school Academia Cesar Chavez aims to provide 'music for everyone'

It's a frigid morning in east Saint Paul, and snow is piling up in the side streets surrounding the Academia Cesar Chavez on White Bear Avenue.

Inside, a music lesson with a difference is happening. In a part of the building which used to be a church, a group of second-graders is standing in neatly organized rows.

Each is holding a miniature violin and bow, and eyeing the adult instructor intently. He plays the lead-off melody on his full-size violin, and the second-graders respond as one with a thrumming accompaniment.

It's a mesmerizing sight. It's the brainchild of the man who is standing unobtrusively in the corner, catching the moment on video with an iPad.

His name is Bondo Nyembwe, and he is the executive director of Academia Cesar Chavez, a dual-language charter school located in a strongly Hispanic neighborhood of St. Paul.

When Nyembwe arrived at Academia three years ago, it had a mariachi band and general music lessons on the curriculum. But parents told him that they wanted more.

"They were saying, 'Look at those other schools and what they offer, with their band programs and orchestras,'" he recalls. "'Why can't we offer music here for everyone?'"

Nyembwe's response was a plan for all 500 pupils at Academia Cesar Chavez to learn an instrument, and be ready to join an orchestra when they go to middle and high school.

First, he found the money to purchase 30 one-eighth-size violins to get the program rolling with the youngest pupils, who soon graduated to one-quarter-size instruments.

"The next phase is one-half-size violins for third-graders," he says. "Each year we will have to buy new instruments until we get to fifth grade."

A partnership with the St. Paul Conservatory of Music has ensured enough teachers will be available to lead lessons. Earlier this school year, the Academia started a band program, which already has 75 members.

The Academia's scheme bears marked similarities to the famous El Sistema in Venezuela, a state music-education program where astonishing numbers of pupils have learned instruments and had the opportunity to play in orchestras.

Nyembwe's exposure to the power that music has to shift emotions and shape attitudes came early, at the church he attended in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in Africa.

"I was middle-class; my father was a teacher," he recalls. "At church, he would always point at the choir and pianist and the accordion player, and although I never got to play I really enjoyed the music."

Nyembwe's is in many ways a typical immigrant story. Fleeing civil war in the Congo, he spent two years in a refugee camp in Zambia before coming to the United States in 1995.

At 16, he attended Edison High School in Minneapolis and then the University of Minnesota, where he studied international relations and Spanish and did a master's in educational leadership.

After graduating, he worked for Enterprise Rent-A-Car before switching to the world of education, where he found more opportunities "to help people at the bottom of the queue," as he puts it.

Starting as an office assistant at a school in south Minneapolis, he rapidly ascended the career ladder, eventually working for four years as a turnaround principal at St. Paul City School in Frogtown before going to Academia Cesar Chavez.

The part of St. Paul where the Academia is situated is one of the most economically challenged in the Twin Cities. Academic test scores at the school are well below the Minnesota average.

But where others might see a problem, Nyembwe sees a big opportunity.

"I believe that we live life for a purpose," he says.

"Mine has less to do with me, because I've already made it in my life. The purpose for me is seeing those at the bottom who struggle, and realizing that those of us who know how should do something about it."

In Nyembwe's vision, the ambitious music program that he has initiated at Academia Cesar Chavez is a crucial part of "doing something about it."

Although academic achievement is important, he believes that it is far from being the only measure of a person's value, or of an individual's readiness to make a contribution to society.

"In this accountability era, everybody talks about proficiency, and the two things they focus on is math and reading," he says.

"But children are not robots. We know many children have musical talent, which may be dormant. If they can unleash that talent, it will fuel their confidence and competence, and make them motivated about learning in general."

Nyembwe's view about the role music can play in unlocking a child's broader learning potential is rooted in what he has experienced in his family.

"I have five children. We got them violin lessons, and it's amazing to see how well they play and the enjoyment they get out of it. "

More than that, though, Nyembwe is fascinated by the important life lessons he has seen his children learning through music.

Self-determination is the main lesson, he says.

"When my son was 7, I saw him in the living room one morning trying to learn a new song on the violin by hearing. And he did; he nailed it. And I thought, 'If he's able to do this, I'll bet many of the pupils in our school can do the same.'"

This can-do philosophy underpins what Nyembwe is attempting to build through music education at Academia Cesar Chavez.

The most recent initiative is allowing second-graders to take their violins home after school, to enable further practice.

"The children love it," he says, "and not one of those instruments has been lost or broken."

But funding is an issue.

Will the money be found to buy the violins needed to enable every pupil at the Academia to play one?

"We see the end in sight," Nyembwe says. "We know where we want to be, which is we want to see these violinists enter our mariachi band, concert band or orchestra program."

"And so we're talking to friends and corporations, we're reaching out to businesses, and we're asking them to support us. Many schools in Minnesota are cutting out music programs and electives, but we're adding them. If we put our hearts to it, it's going to be beautiful."

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