Music and Mentors is the San Francisco Symphony’s program for elevating music education in public middle and high schools throughout the City. The Koret Foundation is a long-time supporter of the SF Symphony and a great fan of Music and Mentors, which is unique in its high-touch approach. The mentors are the heart of this three-pronged program, whose two additional components are purchasing and repairing instruments, and providing free student tickets to live orchestral concerts in Davies Symphony Hall. The 20-year-old program is currently completing a three-year expansion: more music, more mentors, more student-musicians experiencing the joys of individual instruction and collective performance as the grand finale to a year of one-on-one coaching. 

Investing in education has always been a core priority for Koret. In the K–12 sector, we have supported programs from preparation for college to civic learning and engagement, to advancing new learning technologies, to bolstering professional development for educators. As long-time supporters of the Bay Area’s cultural institutions, we are also eager to promote access to quality arts education, and the Music and Mentors program hits all of these notes.

Most of San Francisco’s public middle and high schools (currently over 20) have a full-time, fully-certified music teacher. However, the music teacher must be a generalist, teaching five or six periods a day to students learning to play a multitude of instruments. Music and Mentors was created in response to music teachers’ repeated requests for dedicated coaching to bolster their own knowledge and their students’ skills. Anastasia Herold, who has been the program manager for almost 20 years, neatly sums up the dynamic: “The mentor is there to provide what the regular teacher wants the students to have an opportunity to learn.”

Herold offers the double bass as an example. The school music teachers need someone who is an expert with the instrument, who knows when it’s time to replace the strings, can help students with fingering difficult passages, and celebrate students’ accomplishments by offering solos or special music. Enter the mentor to provide targeted coaching for the students, building individual skills and elevating the entire band or orchestra. This growth builds on itself–—after several years of strong mentorship, the double bass is one of the most popular instruments with students, and now the SF Symphony’s education department co-presents (with the Northern California Chamber Music Academy) an annual SF Winter Bass Bash and week-long summer training camp called Bass Camp.

At Koret, we know that quality arts education cultivates and inspires the art creators, appreciators, and patrons of tomorrow. And more deeply, it helps students find a voice, a medium of self-expression for interpreting the world around them. Music and Mentors indirectly nurtures personal traits and skills that are valuable for all students: learning to communicate, to collaborate, to think of yourself as contributing to a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. 

Koret has taken a broad-brush approach to increasing access to arts education by funding art, music, and dance, in schools, museums, and performance venues throughout the Bay Area. The overarching goal has been to offer as many students as possible the opportunity to see, to make, to do art. In an environment where funding for arts education is constantly at risk, the individual instruction of Music and Mentors fuels enthusiasm and creativity that ripples through a class, and even through an entire school. The students’ excitement about having private lessons from a professional musician is palpable. A single mentor who visits classrooms weekly can be the catalyst for major change.

In the 2024–25 school year, 22 mentors worked with approximately 36 school music teachers and over 1,500 students. The SF Symphony recruits and vets the mentors from the Bay Area community. All are professional musicians and performers, as well as arts educators with extensive training in musical pedagogy. Herold comments, “The mentors’ musical expertise is also diverse, so they can talk about all types of music—from Baroque quartets to Mariachi bands to jazz ensembles. We believe that music is music.” She also likes to paraphrase the Hungarian composer Zoltán Kodály: Everyone has a heartbeat, therefore children are inherently musical.

Herold tells us about a modern guitar class she participated in at Mission High School, with about 30 students. The group included a newcomer (an English-language learner) from the Ivory Coast, whose native language was French, and a student from the Middle East, whose native language was Arabic. Herold enthuses, “The two of them were able to actually dialogue on their instruments. They made a connection from across the room, all of the students sitting in a circle, through music—that they couldn’t make with language.”

Mentors are at the school site on a regular schedule each week, so the school music teacher can count on this support and plan the lesson around it. This consistency is key to the program’s success in exploring “that spark of wanting to learn to play.” In the course of the school year, the mentors form close relationships with the music teachers as well as with the students. Mentor retention is very high—including several musicians who have been with the program since its beginning. Herold comments, “It’s more than a job. It’s a meaningful dedication to students’ lives.” 

At the schools, Herold is a keen observer and an active participant, listening to students and keeping her fingers on the pulse of the program. Her wealth of first-hand anecdotes illustrates the life skills the program nurtures in students in addition to music instruction, including persistence. She tells us about an unhoused student who confided to her that the reason he came to school—and the reason that he was able to graduate—was his music classes. Herold acknowledges, “We were able to take a special interest in this young man’s musical tutelage. Deep involvement with talented young people like this student is part of Music and Mentors.”

Herold points out, “In most pursuits, expressing feelings is more limited. In sports, for example, you’re encouraged to compete. In music, you’re encouraged to feel and communicate.” Participating in a music class can be truly transformative for differently abled students, including those who are non-verbal—and impactful for their classmates. And, for all the student-musicians, nothing can rival the thrill of being in a live performance and being applauded by their peers and their community after a year or more of hard work.