Jim Johnson, director of Denver’s School of Rock.
First of all, I hope you all had a wonderful holiday season with friends and family! As we move into 2020, we have a big change coming up that will affect all of us…. About a year ago, we were faced with the reality that we are outgrowing our current location on Grant St. We have experienced numerous issues with our school’s space, including a lack of lesson rooms adequate to serve all of our students, problems with “dirty power” and blown fuses during rehearsals, restrictions on our operating hours, a lack of exterior signage, having to schedule camp shows and events around the needs of other tenants in our building, etc- all of which have had a detrimental effect on our operations. When I purchased School of Rock Denver from SOR Corporate a little over five years ago, all of these issues were noted with the understanding that they would eventually need to be addressed.
The time has now come to make that change! We have identified a few new possible locations for a permanent new home for SOR Denver, and are now in the process of getting one finalized and ready for build-out. The new location will allow us more lesson rooms and scheduling options for our students and families, plenty of off-street parking, the ability to have summer camp shows/events/workshops in the school (all seasonal shows will still be held at Denver’s local music venues), and a more reliable infrastructure for all of our programs.
Unfortunately, our current landlord has been unable or unwilling to work with us to make sure that we would be able to continue to operate in our current home until the new one is finished. The result of this is that we will need to vacate our space much sooner than expected- by the end of this month, on January 31st.
The good news is that we have found a temporary home for the school for the next few months while the build-out of our permanent new location is in progress, with a goal of occupying the permanent location by the end of May (and possibly sooner than that). We are finalizing the details of that lease for the temporary location, and by the middle of next week, we will have an agreement in place for that space, and I will be sending out all of the specific info about it. The move into the temporary space will be taking place from Monday 1/27-Friday 1/31, just after our current Fall/Winter performance season ends.
As a result, School of Rock Denver will be closed for lessons and rehearsals that week from Monday 1/27-Sunday 2/2, in order to move and set up the new temporary location The plan is to start lessons and rehearsals at the new location during the week immediately following the move (starting Monday 2/3)- although this may need to change, pending any unexpected changes to the amount of time it takes to get the temporary location set up properly. We will keep all of our lesson times, rehearsal times, etc in place, and will try to avoid any major disruptions to our regular operations, apart from the time it will take to move and set up the temporary facility. This is why we have had to delay the announcement of our Spring 2020 show season until today, in order to ensure that the temporary facility will adequately accommodate all of our lessons, rehearsals and other programming, while allowing time for show signups and scheduling arrangements to be made.
This will be a big challenge, but I want you all to know how much I value our students and families, our wonderful instructors and staff, our programs, and our musical community… we are undertaking this change to make sure that we will have a great new facility to match our great program! I am absolutely committed to minimizing the impact that this will have on our students, families and staff, and ask for your patience and understanding as we move into the next chapter for School of Rock Denver.
Thank you so much for your continued support for our program, and please reach out with any questions you may have in the meantime.
Jim Johnson
Owner/General Manager
School of Rock Denver
http://www.schoolofrock-Denver.com