JEFFERSON TWP — When HIS Kids Christian School opens for the fall semester Aug. 27, there will be an addition to the teaching staff, an addition three years in the making.

Suzanne Adams, 42, is joining the faculty as the school's full-time music teacher.

“We are very excited to have this,” said HIS Kids Principal Debora Dawson. “I think we've always thought of music as a form of prayer.”

Adams said her mandate is to develop a quality music program that will encompass all 110 preschool through fourth-graders at HIS Kids. (This fall there are no fifth- or sixth-graders enrolled at HIS Kids.)

She will offer a daily music class for each student, work to ensure that students are able to read music by the end of second grade and have programs that will allow students to highlight their musical abilities.

Adams said music education opens the door to instruction, often unnoticed, in other subjects.

She said, “Music is nothing but math you can hear.”

“Music can incorporate art and gym classes. By making our own instruments we are making art,” said Adams. “By dancing and stressing coordination, we are in gym.

“By learning of other cultures, the instruments they use, by learning to read music or sing in other languages they are learning about world cultures and not being so ethnocentric.

“Music is the universal language. If you can read music you can go from here to China and read the music there,” said Adams.

Adams said, “I moved to Zelienople when I was 12 and graduated from Seneca Valley High School.

“I got a bachelor of fine arts degree from Indiana University of Pa. and taught three years at Holy Redeemer in Ellwood City,” she said.

After spending 17 years at a music studio in Zelienople, Adams said she was working at her church, Buffalo Presbyterian Church, in Sarver, playing piano and working in the office when the church received an email sent by Summit Presbyterian's director of Christian education, Carol Nobi, seeking a full-time music teacher.

HIS Kids is a ministry of Summit Presbyterian Church, 181 Caldwell Drive, and open to students of any Christian denomination.

That advertisement was the culmination of a three-year process to add a music teacher to the school's faculty, said Dawson.

The contributions of an anonymous group of donors will enable the school to pay Adams' salary and purchase musical instruments, she said.

Dawson said, “We're just really excited and hope to bring life into the school. We offer big academics and the Christian spirit, but the music aspect is a whole other dimension.”

Ken Galvan, a member of the school's music committee and former board president, said, “Music changed my life in so many ways as a child. I began learning to read music in fifth grade. Up 'til that point music was just background noise.

“But as music began to make sense on paper, I began to learn how different instruments worked in conjunction with each other and how that mixing of sounds could create wonderful music,” said Galvan.

He added, “I feel that by having the opportunity to learn and appreciate music at an early age I was able to comprehend so many other subjects throughout school and through my older years.”

It's to provide this complementary education that Adams was converting the former art room at HIS Kids into a music room one humid day in July.

Adams said the music room will soon hold keyboards students will learn to play, as well as other instruments.

Adams said, “It's going to be a full-spectrum musical curriculum.

“All kids will be able to read music. Each grade will learn an instrument,” she said.

“For the younger grades, percussion for third-graders, recorders and keyboards for the fourth-graders,” she said. “There's going to be lots of hands-on learning.”

“I'm the first full-time music teacher in a Christian school that I know of,” said Adams. “I am so excited to be getting in on the ground level.”