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Paul Green, new owners talk about plans for former Zena Elementary

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Paul Green directs at his Rock Academy. (photo by Dion Ogust)

Paul Green directs at his Rock Academy. (photo by Dion Ogust)

Speculation about the plans for the former Zena Elementary School has run rampant ever since the Kingston City School District’s Board of Education voted to accept a $926,000 bid for the property from Zena 4 Corners two months ago. But now all parties are talking openly about the future of the school as the Woodstock Music Lab.

If all goes according to plan, the Woodstock Music Lab, a partnership between Paul Green and Michael Lang, could be open by autumn 2015 as a music school that would prepare its students for a possible career in the music industry.

“We don’t want to call it the Woodstock Music School, because it’s so much more than that,” said Green, founder of the Paul Green Rock Academy, and before that the School of Rock. “It’s going to be a business that’s one-third college-level music school, one-third artistic and technology think tank, one-third artist development hub. The focus by no means will be just rock music, but we’ll look at popular music as a whole, film scoring and writing music for television commercials. And all of our students are going to do a little bit of everything, we’re not going to have majors. Every student that walks through our doors is going to learn how to write, perform, engineer, produce, legally encapsulate and market their own music.”

It’s a concept first floated in a Woodstock Film Festival press release dated August 3, 2011, which announced his joining the festival as its music coordinator.

“Green recently moved to Woodstock and is currently working with Michael Lang, co-creator of the 1969 Woodstock Music & Art Festival, on the early phases of building a world renown music college right here in Woodstock,” read the final paragraph of the press release, and it turned out to be more than just an afterthought; Green said that it was one of the primary reasons he moved to the area.

“The music industry just does not develop artists anymore,” Green said. “All the new music technology, while it’s made things easier, it hasn’t necessarily made things better. I listen to the Stones or Elton John or Black Sabbath and I’d say to myself, ‘Why doesn’t music sound this way anymore?’ There’s tens of thousands of great young musicians in this country, but there isn’t a place to go to meet other young musicians.”

 

A great fit

Of course it all began with the closure of Zena as part of a comprehensive redistricting plan which dropped the amount of elementary schools in the district from 11 to seven over a two-year period. But even then, it took Steve and Lysbeth Kursh to help make the connection between the former elementary school’s past and its hopeful future.

“Our son goes to Woodstock Day School, and I drive by Zena all the time,” said Steve Kursh. “It just struck us that there’s a great sports field and a great gym right there, and we could use that for the Woodstock Day School, we could get this, the Day School could use it, and we could find a use for the building.”

The Kursh’s son, Garrett, is also a student at the Paul Green Rock Academy, and a conversation Steve Kursh had with Green helped put the future of Zena into even greater focus.

“(Kursh) said, I want you to come look at something,” Green said. “We both send our kids to the Woodstock Day School and lament the lack of sports fields there, so he was saying to himself, ‘If I can find a tenant for the main building, we can use the sports field for Woodstock Day School.’ And I could not believe my eyes, it was exactly what I’d been looking for, for the past year and a half. 40,000-square feet of well-maintained classroom facilities where we can build recording studios and rehearsal spaces into.”

Green said the Woodstock Music Lab might have set up shop in a former campground in High Falls if not for the sudden availability of Zena. It’s one of many fortuitous circumstances that, if things go as those involved are hoping, could almost make it seem like fate.

“I don’t think we realized how great a fit it was when we initiated this,” said Kursh. “There’s so many positives. If we tried to do anything else it wouldn’t have been the right thing.”

 


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