The plastic milk crate that music teacher Kirstin Anderson carries is brimming with musical instruments as she shuttles from classroom to classroom, floor to floor. On these nearly constant journeys, she traverses the elementary school and two single-sex middle schools of St. Aloysius, which serves 300 students in all. After five years, Anderson has finally managed to memorize each of those children’s names.

St. Aloysius is a private, not-for-profit elementary and middle school serving Harlem’s neediest, and has been a frequent participant in the elementary school programs of The Weill Music Institute at Carnegie Hall, overcoming a lack of music-education funds through a fierce dedication to its students, a quality shared by its music teacher.

“St. Al’s is very good at working with minimal materials,” Anderson says, referring to the school by its nickname. “We don’t have a music classroom. I carry my crate. I carry my guitar. The teachers graciously give me shelf space in their rooms for all of my Carnegie Hall books.”

St. Al’s considers itself both blessed with the generosity of its administration, teachers, and donors, and challenged by the circumstances of its poor, inner-city students. According to school records, 75% of the students live in single-parent households, and all of its students are at or below poverty level. They are all scholarship students as well, through high school and sometimes into college.

At the same time, the school boasts a 100% admission rate to private and magnet high schools, with a 98% graduation rate from high school in four years. With after-school programs available throughout the school year and during holidays, mandatory summer school and summer camp for middle school students, and frequent weekend trips to museums and other events, St. Aloysius is more than year-round for students and teachers—it’s nearly round-the-clock.

“We are not teachers who get out at two or three o’clock,” Anderson says. “St. Al’s is your life.”

That focus applies as well to cultivating the characters of the students, who must reapply for admission between the lower and upper schools, and gain or lose it based solely on one question: Are they willing to try?

Anderson recalls a recent incident that took place while she was working with the sixth-grade girls on materials from LinkUP!, The Weill Music Institute’s music-education program for grades four through six, which distributes soprano recorders along with other curriculum materials to participating schools. There was a new girl in the class, and unlike her classmates, who had studied recorder since the second grade, she had never played the instrument before.

“The other kids were all at the same level, and playing the notes B-A-G was really easy for them at that point, but she was having a really tough time,” Anderson recalls. The new student was unable to keep up with the others and became upset. “What’s really great is that it was the kids beside her who said, ‘Don’t worry, you’re going to get it!’ All she had to do was to keep playing and keep trying.”

And the results of that effort will be on display in May, when the students from St. Aloysius join thousands of other students from New York City and the tri-state area in the LinkUP! concerts at Carnegie Hall. St. Al’s participation in the program is something the school’s principal, Richard E. Burke, first instituted at the school as a fourth-grade teacher back in 1997, and he remains as proud as ever of his students’ accomplishments today: “When we have visitors here, and we take them around, and kids are practicing the recorder, we’ll say, ‘They also go to Carnegie Hall to perform.’ And it just blows people away,” Burke beams. “The rich educational support that Carnegie Hall gives—it’s just tremendous.”