Valencia Music In Westfield Weathers Pandemic with Remote Lessons

WESTFIELD, NJ — Kelly Bennett and Jose Valencia had been teaching music for years before officially opening up Valencia Music in 2014.

“My husband and I met in college and we kind of fell into teaching during college and a little bit afterwards,” Bennet said. “As we started kind of being more teachers than performers, in a professional sense, we actually started to say ‘we really enjoy this, this is an amazing thing to do.’ We started the school officially in 2014, about a month before we got married. And then we found a space that let us have one office, and little by little, we grew.”

That gradual growth has resulted in a current staff of 11 teachers and a line-up of annual shows and summer camps. And amid all the growth, the thing that has remained of utmost importance for Bennet is the sense of community Valencia Music cultivates.

“It’s just that community,” Bennet said. “Growing up, my husband and I played music and performed a lot. That community of really collaborative musicians is just something we really wanted to create. So, that’s what we’re doing.”

When the pandemic was first starting to become a more recognizable threat in March of 2020, Bennet, predicting the inevitable lockdown, moved to pivot Valencia Music’s teaching methods as quickly as was possible.

“I saw the writing on the wall and I said ‘we need to go virtual right now,’” Bennet said. “The one thing I knew was coming was they were talking about closing the schools. These kids need to be able to connect with their teachers, we need to find ways for them to connect with each other, because this is going to throw their worlds upside down. In an effort to offer some continuity in their lives, we were like ‘we’re going on Zoom and we’re creating lesson meetings for everybody.’”

Within that first weekend, Valencia Music had moved its entire roster — which was more than 300 students at the time — online.

“We just had to keep meeting with everyone and talking with everyone and seeing where everyone was at,” Bennett said. “We knew that we were gonna have to flex our leadership muscles harder than we ever had. You can’t drive a ship through a storm without a captain. We were gonna do everything we could to make sure they still had their students, they still had paychecks and could pay their rent, but also so that they had the fulfillment of connecting with their students and seeing progress in a really challenging form. That was really important.”

In that remote environment, the teachers had to rethink the way they approached lessons.

“We had to teach our students to become independent much sooner than we normally would have anticipated,” Bennett said. “We have had some students who really propelled because we weren't there to tune their guitars or play their scales for them. They had to do it on their own; they had to figure it out. You try to take the challenges and find ways that you can create positives out of those kinks. That was one of the things we were able to do.”

The studio initially did a partial reopening in July of 2020, though most students and lessons remained virtual. That reopening was set up to mimic that of a hospital to ensure maximum safety for staff and students — students were separated from teachers by lengths of see-through shower curtains and all staff and students wore masks.

Now, with the prevalence of vaccinations constantly increasing, the studio is beginning to come out of its safe-separation set-up, though is maintaining mask-use to protect its younger students.

“Our teachers are incredible,” Bennett said. “They’ve all really just shown up, a hundred percent, for all their students. We couldn’t ask for a better group of teachers through all of this.”

And throughout the struggles of a global pandemic, Valencia Music’s community really came together to support each other.

“One of the sweetest things that did come out of that was we did have a few of our students donate lessons to families,” Jose Valencia said. “Even some of our staff donated their time.”

Looking ahead, Bennet is maintaining a positive outlook on the state of the school and its gradual reopening.

“There’s a lot of positives and I guess my catchphrase for the last year was ‘onwards and upwards,’” Bennet said. “In March of 2020, it felt like somebody knocked the legs off of the table and we all just fell down. And we were like, well, how do you put legs back on the table? And I think we’re headed in that direction, but maybe better and more prepared than we would have been had we continued the trajectory we were on in that March.”

“I would just like to say that we’re so happy to get back to Crossroads,” Bennett added. “Lee from Crossroads has had a really tough time during this whole thing. And he just has been nothing but positive. He has just been supportive and an advocate and he is a huge part of our community. Lee at Crossroads has been instrumental in getting us back sooner than later.”