Resiliency. How did you learn it? What comes to mind for you?

It’s something I started thinking about a lot after I heard Ryan Peck speak on a panel at Treefort Music Fest last year. Peck is the co-founder of Boise Rock School, a local nonprofit that empowers kids through music.

The panel I attended was on all-ages music scenes and had, in addition to Peck, several people from other states that had fostered all-ages music communities in their cities, such as The Vera Project in Seattle. I arrived late (whoops) and when I walked in, Peck was talking about how important it was for kids to have opportunities to be resilient. He spoke specifically about skateboarding and learning to play music, activities where learning is a fail-fail-fail-fail-success model. And how in such activities, once you reach success, it is yours and yours alone. You learn that you can fail more than once and still achieve your goal.

I left super intrigued and have kept thinking about it. What does that experience foster in kids and how does it transfer to adulthood? What opportunities exist in Boise that encourage kids to find something they love, and keep practicing it until they succeed?

Luckily there are some. Definitely could be more. One is Boise Rock School.

Back in the mid 2000s, Ryan Peck was living in the East Bay Area and teaching grade school. “I was faced with this situation where there wasn't a lot of stuff within the academic school system that kids could passionately pursue. The budgets were terrible – I don't even know if there was basketball. It was challenging work. I was a new teacher in a new place and I struggled a bit to connect with the kids.”

Peck started thinking of what he could do. He ended up going to Guitar Center and bought two turntables, a drum machine, a little mixer, and some speakers. Then he went over to Rasputin Records and Amoeba Records and bought a few different genres. He went back to school and told the kids, who were about 10-11 years old, “At 3:15 on Thursdays, I'm going to be over in the cafeteria and if anyone wants to come, come and we can figure this out together. We can write some rhymes and we can do whatever we want to. Sky's the limit.”

“It was like oh my gosh, I just changed something for them. Seeing a kid put their fingers on the drum pads and a drum machine and seeing them hear this snare and kick drum. Or showing them on a vinyl record that, okay, listen to it, that's where you hear this snare hit, now put your hand on it, pull it back, and then hit it – that's that initial kind of scratch sound you hear.”

Peck saw magic happen in that cafeteria. Though that may have been the first time he witnessed what opportunity and access to music can do for kids, it was not his first experience with it.

Peck grew up in Twin Falls and had his struggles there. “There was some fit issues for me there, as who I was and what I was passionate about. Picking up a guitar was world changing for me,” he said. “I remember the first songs I was learning in high school – it was like Soundgarden and Pearl Jam – but it was just that act of being like I don't know how to do this. But then you keep trying and eventually you're like, check it out I can play Fell on Black Days by Soundgarden. I can play it.”

“That little process is the same as learning to kickflip. It's the same in the sense that when you get done with it, you're like, I did that. And, with music, when you start writing your own songs and you're actually magically creating this piece of art – that's like next level. And I know for me, that was a game changer,” he said. “So, I was like, well this is the vehicle that I understand where I can start to try to be the person that I needed when I was a kid.”

After teaching in the Bay, Peck moved to Boise and took a teaching job at Boise State. He was still reflecting on his own life in Twin Falls and making music with his students in the East Bay when he had an idea. At the time, Guitar Hero was all the rage and School of Rock had recently come out. It seemed like making music was having a moment. So, Peck got together with Jared Goodpaster, who he used to river guide with, and pitched the idea of starting something with kids in Boise like he had in California.

“I didn't know quite what it would look like and I didn't want to totally leverage off this rock thing that was happening, but I did want to offer, you know, something for youth that allows for this cool thing to happen. This intangible thing that I had witnessed in Oakland and had witnessed with myself when I picked up a guitar or picked up a skateboard or did BMX.”

Ryan Peck and Jared Goodpaster co-founded Boise Rock School in summer of 2008. They held the first camp with one band with five or six kids and the two of them to teach songs.

“We were just like we’re gonna try it. We didn’t know. We got the word out and got the six kids. They played like a Neil Young song and an ACDC song – things that were easy for just the two of us to teach them. And it worked.”

Kids and parents alike seemed really interested, so they started up a weekly class on Tuesday nights. They had charged for that first camp and took all the money and bought all the instruments they could afford. Boise Contemporary Theatre agreed to let them use their basement for classes. So, they were off with the first iteration of Boise Rock School.

Over the next few years they held summer camps and started more classes. They rented rooms in schools and empty buildings and whatever profit they made, they used it to buy more instruments and equipment.

In 2012, a building in downtown Boise came up for sale. Before Boise Rock School could gather the funds to purchase it a real estate company bought it. Not losing hope, they made an offer to lease it, which was accepted.

With a home of their own, Boise Rock School leveled up. They hired more teachers and began offering more band classes and classes addressing different instruments on their own. They started doing filmmaking, recording, and graphic design, incorporating other essential parts of the music industry and creative process beyond playing an instrument.

Over the next eight years, Boise Rock School grew as an organization to seeing about 500 kids a week in regular classes, plus hosting winter and summer break camps and doing outreach around the state of Idaho. Since the beginning, they have never turned anyone away for inability to pay.

In 2020, when covid hit, Boise Rock School started thinking seriously about the long term. “I realized that with any building downtown, unless you were made of money, your days were likely numbered,” said Peck. The organization understood that owning their own building was essential to the future of the nonprofit.

Today, two years later, hammers are swinging in the future home of Juno Arts, which will house Boise Rock School, Rock on Wheels (the outreach arm of the organization), and teach other skills like graphic design, filmmaking and audio engineering. They were able to purchase a building in 2020 through a capital campaign and when complete, it will be a $1.8 million project.

The future home of Juno Arts is on the corner of Orchard and Fairview Avenue on the Boise Bench. It’s a long rectangle building with lots of space to transform. Eventually, Juno Arts will have ten classrooms for programs that teach music to kids age 3-18, a film and recording studio, and a small venue for live performances.

While Juno Arts and Boise Rock School offer programs for a range of ages, teenagers are the prime demographic. Think of it like this: there’s a lot of stuff for kids age 3-12 to do in Boise, right? There’s playgrounds up the yang, the discovery center, etc. But when a kid is age 13, 14, or 15, they start thinking more about what do I like? What do I love? And that’s the sweet spot for Boise Rock School.

“Empowering kids to find the things that they love is what we do,” said Peck. “Not to discount the school district or school systems, but often a lot of stuff is sort of like, fenced off from teens, yet that's where the really good stuff lives. Like skateboarding, BMX, or mountain biking, or listening to music, playing music, performing music that you actually like, or learning to make your own little movies or learning to make your own podcast.”

“It’s so important when you can have a situation where a youth chooses the thing that they can go bonkers over and really get into. And especially if it's something that is inherently really challenging. Like skateboarding is tough, right? Learning to ollie, the most basic thing, is really hard, and when you are learning you fall and hurt your ankle and tear shoes and pants,” said Peck. “You have this sort of like fail, fail, fail, fail, succeed. That success is your success. It wasn't like scoring the touchdown for your school or your parents. And not to discount that, but it's different, it plays different. I firmly believe that is where resilience comes from. Because you learn that you can fail a lot and still get there. It empowers kids to not be as afraid of those things that might come down the pipe later.”

“I think that's what we're ultimately trying to get at. That's our job as adults now – to make those things available. But in an equitable way, because that's the other big hurdle. We don't turn anyone away for inability to pay. We scholarship a ton of kids that wouldn't come otherwise,” said Peck.

“That’s kind of the currency of the world for me, like, how can people find those things they love? And also, how do we create accessibility? How do you make it accessible for everyone to play? To have a part in something they love to do? And those are tricky questions. Those are institutional, those are societal, those are just big questions,” said Peck. “But in our little circle, we try to do it.”

You can learn more about Boise Rock School and Juno Arts here, and support the building of their amazing new building here.

Thanks for reading!

With love from Boise,

Marissa

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