For kids who don’t like sports, School of Rock offers another avenue for them to expend their talents and energy.
School of Rock Kent is King County’s newest location for the School of Rock franchise, with their opening in October 2023 at Kent Station, 445 Ramsay Way in Suite 104.
Owned by Aaron Rossler, the school offers weekly classes for kids seven and younger called “The Little Wings,” where they learn to enjoy music, and play all of the instruments offered.
The school also offers lessons-only classes where kids and adults learn one-on-one from an instructor on how to play an instrument. Then there are the performance groups for kids 18 and under, and then a separate group for adults. In these performance groups, they learn different songs for each season, rehearsing for two hours a week, and then each kid has a one-on-one lesson each week.
Rossler said the students practice for mid-season and end-of-season performances. They utilize the patented School of Rock “songs-first method” where they teach kids how to play the songs and sprinkle in theory throughout since theory is still considered important.
“The nice thing about School of Rock performances is it’s kids playing, it’s kids that are still learning, so they mess up during the concerts, and it’ll happen. But the groups that are there to watch are always supportive. They understand what School of Rock is, that it’s kids that might have only been playing together for two or three months, and the kids mess up, and then they recover, and the crowd cheers them on, so they get that resilience,” Rossler said. When they recover, he said, it shows kids it’s okay if they fail as long as they pick themselves back up.
Rossler said that he opened the franchise in Kent because he was looking to open a business that would not only work well but also benefit the community. Right now, he said they’re trying to keep things going, but if he won the lottery, he would do it all for free.
“There wasn’t really anything like School of Rock that was serving people south of Seattle, the next closest ones in Portland,” Rossler said. “So we also wanted to bring what School of Rock did for us and the other families to the area south of Seattle, around Kent, Federal Way, south Renton, places like that. That’s how we got into this.”
Rossler said when he was looking to become a franchise owner, he spoke to multiple different franchise owners and he learned the impact that being a member of School of Rock can have on a kid.
“I didn’t speak to a single franchise owner that hadn’t said they’ve had a parent say, ‘School of Rock saved my kid’s life,’” Rossler said. “A lot of the kids that join stuff like this are the kids that don’t fit into sports teams or things like that, and this is where they find their group and where they belong, and they make a lot of friends. So, a lot of kids come into this and make lifelong friends.”
For more information, visit schoolofrock.com/locations/kent or call 253-246-7518.
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