MUSIC & RESILIENCE by Gaby Montiel

Allison Cheng is the Choir Teacher at Palisades Charter High School, who has spent her life immersed in the arts, dedicating herself to the community and her students. The arts have woven themselves throughout Cheng’s life. Her parents met through orchestra rehearsal, with her dad giving her mom a ride to their shared classes. She spent her earlier years dedicated to violin, guitar, piano, and choir, taking both private lessons and immersing herself in her school’s arts programs.

Throughout high school, Cheng participated in the school choir, orchestra, and jazz band. When she moved to college, she started to question the direction of her life, and what she would want to do when she graduated. Cheng knew she wanted to pursue music, but wasn’t sure where it would lead her in the future. She decided to major in vocal performance, and took a conducting class that changed her life. She fell in love with the art of conducting by volunteering at a local high school near her university starting in 2015 where the teacher let her take over the class. These high school classes would spark the joy and challenges of working with students at all ages.

During her time as USC, Cheng would travel around many school districts, exposing herself to multiple age groups of students from TK - 12th grade. Because of her experience from volunteering in schools, she gained skills she used during her choral conducting master’s degree programs at USC from 2016-2018 and her masters in Contemporary Teaching Practices K-12 in 2018-2019. After graduating in 2019, she worked with students with general music and choir from TK to 8th grade from 2019-2022; and in August of 2022, she began teaching at Palisades Charter High School.

Teaching at Palisades Charter High School would be the beginning of a time where Cheng would develop her own view on education, music, and community, inspiring and being inspired by many lessons within her time here. Naturally, when asked why she enjoyed conducting, Cheng immediately began talking about her students. She has always been dedicated to creating a comfortable and safe environment within her classroom. In the years prior to Cheng’s arrival, Palisades High School’s choir program was struggling. Cheng is the fourth choir teacher in five years, because the years prior to her arrival were filled with educators who were not the right fit, or not able to stay. This amount of change caused a large disconnect between the students and their environment at school. The directors preceding Cheng left the program feeling unstable, so that upon her arrival, the students would already be preparing to watch her leave within a few months. “If you want students to care, they need to feel cared about,” Cheng says. She understood that she would have to earn her students' trust, and she quickly started to transform the choir room. She opened the doors for everyone throughout the day, layed out snacks and fidget toys, and filled the air with the sweet cadence of choral music. Her students displayed signs of high stress and poor mental health, but Cheng knew that she would not be able to help them until their basic needs of belonging were met. “I knew something was going on, but until they had the snacks, until they had the fidgets, until they felt safe, they were going to say nothing to me. Why would they? Why would they bother?” For Cheng, she knew that fostering a sense of culture and belonging above anything else would be the driving factor in creating, not just beautiful music, but beautiful people. She believes that music offers ways for students to learn how to work with other people, and more importantly, to find their own voice in their surrounding society. As a recent student herself, Cheng is well aware of the questioning that occurs for her students surrounding the direction of their lives.

She wanted to provide something for them to begin to experiment with their passion and interests. It was then that the creation of the music tech and business industry class was put in place. In this class, students can create beats, learn how to manage a website portfolio, and practice pitching themselves to get hired. Cheng wishes to create a strong individual foundation within her students before they embark on their flourishing path, so that they can face those who try to dictate their beliefs. “If I don’t teach my students how to think for themselves, someone else will do that for them.”

However, just as Cheng was nurturing a beautiful sense of belonging for her students, in January 2025, the Los Angeles fires began, destroying businesses, homes, and schools such as Palisades High School. The damage done by the LA fires would leave open wounds on the city, vulnerable and exposed for everyone to witness. “There was nothing. Everything was flattened,” Cheng says. She desperately wanted to reach out to her students to offer support, but she held herself back. “I wanted to give them time to process…It’s a lot to take in.” In a plaza near the high school, a Starbucks had burned down, which was especially painful, Cheng noted. Though there are thousands of Starbucks throughout the nation, the sight of their place, their hangout spot, their plaza flattened by natural disaster was overwhelming. The memories – the first dates, beginnings and ends of friendships, inside jokes – it all seemed to be buried beneath the rubble, just out of reach, but so delicately visible. Cheng knew that her students needed help. She had spent so long building a place of belonging for them, and she recognized that this was still her role in the face of destruction.

The LA fires would leave countless homes and businesses in wreckage, and there would be multiple cities affected by this disaster. Shortly after the fires, she received a call. “‘The Grammy’s are calling,’ they said. [Cheng responded] ‘What?’ ‘I said, the Grammy’s are calling. Can I give them your number?’”  In the 2025 Grammys, wanted to feature choirs from the cities impacted by fires as their own way of rebuilding community. Cheng seized the opportunity without hesitation. She took a group of 10 choral students to sing “We Are the World” with Herbie Hancock and Stevie Wonder. “When people see the next generation standing together after what was…a horrible natural disaster that is still able to come together and make music on top of it…that inspires other people.” Cheng explains how children are the embodiment of hope, they are the desire to grow, and the vision of the future we have to work for a world that will not always exist in struggle and destruction. “That is the importance of these programs,” Cheng points out. Music is the medium where acceptance is not encouraged, but necessary to exist. The invisible melodies wrap-around communities and pull them tight, forcing people to look at each other and acknowledge their humanity and their passion. “[Arts] programs change lives. I see it everyday,” Cheng says. ​

The Palisades High School is only one account of the many cities that were affected by the LA fires. While there are many ways for people to help in sight of this disaster, such as performing and encouraging arts within their own communities, the funding for arts programs such as Cheng’s to get the resources they need to recover is severely low. Donations, no matter how small, are always treated with utmost gratitude. For Palisades High School, they lost access to rooms full of brand new MacBooks, collections of instruments, music libraries, and their entire arts center building. At the credit recovery site, Pali Academy, all of the guitars and materials burned to the ground. While it is unclear what will be able to be recovered after inspections, currently the VAPA program lacks a storage unit to place any retrievable items and to hand out what they have left to students. Consider visiting one of the links/websites on this page to give something back to these programs that are designed with no intent other than to provide a sense of belonging and passion for students, teachers, parents, and children alike. ∎

If you can and feel called, donate to Palisades Charter High School.
Pali Choir: https://givebutter.com/PCHSChoir
Pail Music Tech: https://givebutter.com/PCHSMusicTech
Pali Academy Guitar: https://givebutter.com/PCHSGuitar