Georgia Music School Survives Pandemic

Alpharetta, GA — Katie Pearsall started playing music when she was in middle school. Inspired by a teacher who discovered her near-perfect pitch and encouraged her to simply try, she did whatever she could to gain and further her expertise. It wasn’t long before she realized how much she wanted to own her own music school.

“I went to college and got my teaching degree, teaching license, everything,” Pearsall said. “I’m glad I had the experience, but I realized I needed to hold onto that dream. I worked at a bunch of different studios here in Georgia — I learned what you could do and what you should avoid.”

Knowing that there was no guarantee of success, Pearsall decided to make her dream of owning her own music school a reality. She opened Infinity Music School in Alpharetta.

“That was very exciting,” Pearsall said. “After I opened up, it was a huge learning experience. I’ve always wanted to have something like that. It was a dream come true. I got lucky.”

In March of 2020, the pandemic struck; threatening her dream. New students disappeared. Many students withdrew.

“Some people have taken lessons with me for almost a decade, and they didn’t have the money, they didn’t know what was going to happen,” she said. “Some people came back, more people left. No one new came in for lessons.”

In gestures of good faith to families she had worked with for years, Pearsall started floating lesson fees, pushing back the date that payments were due.

“It was scary. It was a lot of up at night, ‘what am I going to do.’ I had other business opportunities that just dried up; gigs dried up. I was nervous, very nervous.,” Pearsall said. “2020 was just a huge turning point of ‘can I do this?’ I had to tell myself ‘you can do this. If you weren’t supposed to do this, you wouldn’t have done it in the first place. And now you’re doing it, even if it’s not great, even if it’s not perfect."

“Just like you learn a song or a solo; it’s okay if you make a couple mistakes, that’s why you rehearse it.”

She knew if the school was going to survive, she was going to have to find other ways to teach. Online was the answer, though she knew, for the students, it would not be ideal.

“Getting online lessons was difficult,” Pearsall said, adding that she would tell students, “we’re just going to give it a shot. I don’t expect anything too much.’ Some of these kids, because they’re musicians, they’re more sensitive, and I don’t mean emotionally. They’re sensing heat, temperature, humidity, everyone’s emotions, things like that. To watch them come in every week, I’m like ‘I love you, I’m proud of you, you are doing so well.’ I had to pump them up and be a cheerleader. So, it was hard. Those online lessons were hard.”

In early 2021, before the studio reopened for in-person lessons, Pearsall began working with some students outside and at safe distances.

“There is hope, there is positive stuff at the end of the tunnel,” Pearsall said. “There’s some parents that want to come back in, but some parents are going to wait and see because we have all these new variants. It’s a little bit better than it was.”

For Pearsall, the whole thing has been a series of lessons.

“As a business owner, being brand new, it’s different than if I had been open for five years or 10 years,” Pearsall said. “I just started. For me, I feel like I’m still in the baby stages of learning a lot of things. As a teacher, my job is never to tell people if they’re talented or not. My job is to take away any fear so they can just be themselves.”

Now, the studio is open for both in-person and virtual lessons. And in the end, she says, it’s worth it.

“I just want to give music to children.”