VANCOUVER, Wash. – Four years ago, the future seemed ominous at Vancouver’s piano-tuning school for the blind.
Then known as the Emil B. Fries Piano Hospital, the school was losing money. Enrollment was down. Fewer people were looking to have their pianos serviced. The school was in a crisis that began shortly after longtime leader Ken Serviss left in 2001.
This year’s graduating class heads to Canada, New York and Las Vegas in search of work at a time when their alma mater seems destined for a better future.
With the arrival of new leader Len Leger, enrollment and revenues are up and there is a clear vision for the renamed School of Piano Technology for the Blind.
The Emil B. Fries Piano Hospital was founded in 1949 by Fries, a former Washington State School for the Blind teacher.
“About 60 to 70 percent of blind or visually impaired people are unemployed or underemployed,” said Leger, executive director of the school.
The school provides an alternative, by teaching students how to tune pianos. The tuning and service work performed by students and staff once provided 85 percent of the school’s revenues.
Sales dropped at the start of this decade, in part because the school had gradually become less visible, but also because of global trends as people buy keyboards rather than pianos.
“The school was losing money, and it needed to think of a new way to keep the mission going,” Leger said.
Leger was graduate program coordinator at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York when he started losing his vision.
Around the same time, his and his wife’s desire to move to the West Coast was fulfilled when Leger’s wife accepted a job at Southwest Washington Medical Center. Leger knew nothing about the piano-tuning school at the time.
“I wanted to work with the blind and visually impaired people,” said Leger, who has a degenerative vision disorder. He quickly applied when he learned of the opening.
“This position was a perfect fit,” Leger said.
After he was hired in 2004, he reached out to the school’s governing board, inviting new members to join and add their expertise. With lawyers, bankers, classical pianists, business owners and piano school alumni, “all of the skill sets we need are represented on the board,” Leger said.
He also brought back retired former director Serviss as an adjunct faculty member.
With the guidance of the board, the school began to make drastic changes, beginning with the name.
“Emil B. Fries Piano Hospital doesn’t really give our mission,” Leger said.
Although Fries is well known in some circles in Vancouver, the name School of Piano Technology for the Blind helps the school reach out to students and donors who might not understand the school’s purpose, he said.
The turnaround was more than just a superficial name change. Leger restructured the finances, cutting expenses and shifting the business model away from relying on tuning and service work for 85 percent of the revenues.
Now the school aims to get 40 percent of its budget from piano tuning and service, 20 percent from tuition, and 40 percent from fundraising and development.
The school tapped into big foundations. Grants from the Meyer Memorial Trust and other groups have paid to develop a strategic plan and to improve its Web site.
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