York native Keri Shultz has dedicated her entire career to improving access to music for the people of Berks. As the President of the Reading Musical Foundation, she provides support to more than 20 different music and arts projects across the county.
How did you get involved with the Reading Musical Foundation? I was very fortunate. I went to school at Kutztown and did my internship with the [Santander] Arena and the Performing Arts Center, and when I was graduating the former director at Santander – Karen Haver – knew my predecessor here. So, it just all fell into place. I started out at RMF as the administrative assistant, and after a few years I became the executive director and then president. I joke that I’m never going to leave because they just keep giving me bigger titles.
Sounds like you must be doing something right! I guess. When I came to RMF in 2003 we didn’t do nearly the scope of work in the community that we do now. It seems like every five years or so we take on a new, big initiative.
What big initiative are you working on now? For the past several years we’ve been really focused on our public school music programs. There were some threats to trim or cut them in some schools. I learned that there weren’t really any data metrics that were being tracked about school music and arts programs, so we started with resolving that. Now that we have the data, we are tweaking our programming to better serve our students.
What programming have you implemented based on that data? One example is that we’ve found 100 percent of the high school seniors in Reading’s music program graduate on time, but there are a lot of barriers to keeping them in the program. It can be as simple as having access to an instrument. So, we launched Operation Replay to accept donated instruments, have them refurbished, and give them out to students who can’t afford to rent or purchase them on their own. We’ve been able to build up the instrument inventory for all the schools in Berks County.
Did you grow up playing an instrument? I’m actually a fourth-grade flute dropout! I did start practicing piano with my son about four years ago, but he’s definitely surpassed me.I don’t think being a musician is necessarily in the stars for me, but I love what I do. I think what I get so much satisfaction from is seeing students who weren’t like me and who really blossom through music.
In your spare time do you like to attend performances around town? I do! Even if I wasn’t working for RMF, I would still be doing that. It’s a lot of fun. I think our local organizations have done a lot of soul searching over the last couple of years to decide how they want to represent themselves with the music that they perform, so the performances themselves are very authentic. And now that my kids are older, they and my husband get to come with me. It’s amazing what we have right here at our fingertips.
