progress
Free music classes now reach 21,000 Miami kids
He was a student in the program once. Now he teaches it.
Young Musicians Unite now brings free music classes to roughly 21,000 students across 131 schools in Miami-Dade County, the nonprofit told CBS News Miami. The group partners with schools to teach instruments at no cost, and some of its graduates come back to teach. Reinaldo Velez was a YMU student himself. He now leads a class at Little River K-8, where one of his trumpet players, 9-year-old Jayden Morisseau, laid out the appeal plainly. "You get a lot of opportunities to go places, and you get better at playing your horns, and also, you got a good teacher that knows a lot of music," he said. Velez sees it as more than horns. Kids learn personality skills along the way, he said, including how to fix an instrument. Founder and CEO Gonzalez Zeira grew up a musician in Miami. "Kids need a reason to show up to school," he said.
