Amy Renzulli’s introduction to School of Rock came when her daughter Abby ran to her crying, begging to let her take music lessons.
“She was about, I’m going to say 11 or 12, and she just came to me in tears,” said Renzulli. “She said, ‘There’s no music in this house. I need music. You don’t understand.’”
Renzulli, who was working at Blue Cross Blue Shield at the time, reasoned that she was working to provide those kinds of opportunities. “So that’s when I googled Rock Camp and found Chicago School of Rock, and she started going there,” Renzulli said.
Renzulli, now the CEO of two School of Rock locations, credits Abby as the tipping point into her adventure as an owner of a music school. “She was kind of impetus to all of it. Opening the school here wasn’t for her, it was for the community, but she is the one that kind of pulled us into this musical journey.”
Renzulli owns and operates two School of Rock locations. The first location, which she acquired in February 2013, is in Oak Park, where she lives. The second, which she bought at the height of the pandemic in July 2020, is School of Rock Glenbrook (which is technically located in Northbrook).
In 2013, both of Renzulli’s children were attending School of Rock in Chicago, the original Chicagoland location downtown on Ashland and Belmont. That’s when she saw an opportunity. “I said to the woman working at the front desk…‘You guys should open one of these in Oak Park. It would do really well.’ And she said, ‘Well, you should open one in Oak Park, because it’s a franchise.”
While Renzulli was immediately turned off by the idea of a franchise, “that thought lasted about a nanosecond,” and she began looking into opening a location of School of Rock in Oak Park. “Oak Park is just so unique because of its proximity to the city, where a lot of musicians live,” she said, adding that the village has “wonderful venues, both here in town and in Berwyn and Chicago, and then it’s a community of people who value the arts, and…it’s just a vibrant creative place.”
The walls as School of Rock Oak Park (often abbreviated as SOROP) are covered with accolades by School of Rock corporate: Highest U.S. School Student Count 2020, Top Performer – Shows 2017-2018, and Top Overall Performer 2016.
SOROP’s success doesn’t end there. Most SORs, typically after a few years of opening, begin a program called the House Band. The House Band is an audition-based program for students between the ages of 12 and 18, comprising the highest-level musicians at any given SOR’s location. It’s extremely competitive in terms of talent and professionalism. These students perform at local venues and gigs. Typically, in smaller SOR locations, save up for a big summer tour across the U.S.
Because of its size and abundance of talent, SOROP not only has a House Band, but a second team performing at an even higher level called the Show Team, which is even more competitive and harder to audition for than the House Band.
In the summer of 2024, SOROP’s Show Team was invited to play at a nightclub in Madrid, Spain, and a music festival in Lisbon, Portugal as part of a trip to Europe. Only three other American SORs were asked to participate.
The students are serious about music, but the physical space at SOROP is funky and eclectic. “I think the casual nature of it makes it feel fun and makes it feel less like work and more like an escape, more like a community,” said Jamie Regenstein, a current student and member of SOROP’s Show Team with a nine-year tenure at SOR under his belt.
That makes SOROP unique, according to Michael Brooks, its current music director, who has worked at both the Oak Park and Glenbrook locations. “If you go to 98% of other new schools that are opening, they are in storefronts…former doctor’s offices, dentist’s offices, retail spaces, whatever,” he said. “I know that [Amy] did not want this building to have that feel,” he said, noting that the Oak Park space has “a lot more grit.”
“I wanted it to be unique, authentic, gritty, cool, vibrant. I wanted there to be a lot of eye candy,” Renzulli said. That “eye candy” includes floor-to-ceiling murals in student spaces, posters of past shows lining every wall, abstract art in every lesson room, framed photography of famous musicians, mood lighting and string lights, and donated art from friends of the school, alumni or currently enrolled students.
“There used to be a big portrait of Snoop Dogg holding like a sword,” said Regenstein. “And then, I mean, the big wall of posters is super cool, which are student’s designs, but it’s cool that there are kids who have the opportunity to make the posters for the various shows that we’ve done, so those are always fun to walk by and look at.”
The maximalist, creative energy at SOROP extends into Renzulli’s own home. Her basement has been transformed into an art studio that is a smaller scale version of her workspace in Long Beach, Indiana. Her living room is filled with her pieces.
Her recent work is among the most abstract, derived from layering different materials on top of each other and exploring textures and materials.
“I think anybody can be creative; like people say I’m not creative, or I can’t draw,” said Renzulli. “One thing I really want to do in my next life is teach. I’d love to teach. I’d love to show people what I do and how I do it.”
