Welcome To MacArthur Metro

Music makers at COVA. Photos by Nick Lostracco. Click to enlarge.

Up 35^th Ave. and just across Highway 13 on Mountain Blvd. is the entrance to Conservatory of Vocal/Instrumental Music (COVA), Oakland's charter music school, now beginning its second year. Using the vacated premises of the Seventh Day Adventist Academy, up a long, wooded driveway, COVA aims to bring back to at least one Oakland public school the music training that once permeated the entire system.

COVA's principal and co-founder, Dr. Valerie Abad, grew up in Oakland, attending Sequoia, Bret Harte, and Oakland High. "Oakland had a fabulous music program," she said. "When I later taught in several Oakland public schools, I was sickened by the closing down of the music in the schools. When the charter system got going, I realized this was an opportunity to establish a strong music program in at least one school."

It took Dr. Abad and her husband and co-founder, Mehdi, four years to wend their way, application in hand, through the hearings, community meetings, county and state approvals, and facilities search needed to establish COVA. Last fall, they opened with 50 fifth-through-eighth graders. Normally, a new school starts with the earliest grades, in order to inculcate its philosophy and procedures most easily, but, Dr. Abad said, "We needed the older children right away. The parents and officials needed to see performances, and performances by kindergarteners weren't going to cut it."

This year the school has 150 kindergarten-through-eighth graders. Classes are spread among the woodsy, light-filled hillside buildings, which have large rooms and a well-appointed auditorium with excellent acoustics.

Students at COVA have a normal school day from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.—reading, math, science, and so forth, with one addition: every class has vocal training every day. The vocal music instructor, Kate Offer [full disclosure: this reporter's daughter], took her training, a Master of Music, at Holy Names University, which is, by delightful coincidence, the next property to the west. Holy Names' Department of Music Pedagogy instructs its students in the Kodaly Method, a careful, step-by-step procedure to teach singing in tune, rhythm, and the mysteries of written music. Besides lifelong appreciation of and ability to make music, learning to sing well prepares the student for learning to play instruments, which they start in the third grade.

Coincidentally, the long-time editor of this newspaper, Toni Locke, in fact literally "wrote the book" that Ms. Offer uses. [see sidebar on Ms. Locke.]

From 2 to 4 p.m., every day but Wednesday, COVA school becomes a beehive of artistic and physical activity, with instrumental lessons, musical group practices, visual arts classes, and yoga, sports, dance, and playground games. There are a jazz band, a drum corps, and a number of classical ensembles, and an all-school choir.'

No audition or musical test is needed to enroll in COVA. The children of COVA are simply children who live in Oakland whose parents would particularly like them to develop music skills. As a charter school, COVA also charges no tuition—it is a public school, paid for with state funds. There is a higher percentage of musically gifted students, but there are also children whose parents simply wanted a more organized and structured program. It is an oftentimes-verified fact that learning music improves logic and math reasoning and provides emotional focus. "We watched the children's math scores go up and up last year," remarked Dr. Abad. "Having the structure and the discipline of music has been proven over and over to assist in the understanding of math concepts."'

Dr. Abad says that the school emphasizes performance skills not only to create good musicians, but in order to help the children with life skills. "I tell them, 'You know when you performed something well, and that's what's important. Your audience, which is comprised here of your parents, relatives and friends, will always give you a big applause. That's nice, but you can't pay too much attention. You have to do your best and then ask yourself how you think you did. It's an invaluable life skill to be able to evaluate your own performance honestly and therefore know when to work on fixing something and when to feel satisfied.'"

Dr. Abad sees a tremendous difference between the students returning for the second year and this year's new arrivals. She is looking forward to next year, when 80 percent of the student body will be trained in COVA's philosophy and discipline, and the incoming kindergarteners will have all the other students as models. "What we put in place is working," she states with great satisfaction. "Now we just need to do it."