With the increased popularity and expansion of career and technical education, students in high schools across Colorado can graduate with certificates in welding, construction, auto mechanics, and more. At Community Prep School, an alternative charter school in Colorado Springs School District 11, the students who are part of the “School of Rap” program might graduate with a Grammy.
Last year, local hip hop artist KO Kelly was invited to work with students at Community Prep. “I’m an artist myself,” said Kelly. “I started touring and then I came home and got in contact with Mr. Raj Solanki [Community prep Principal] and he contracted my business to come in and make an album with the kids. That ended up getting picked up by Roc Nation [Jay-Z’s entertainment company] immediately, and it’s literally just been 100% since then.”
The album, “School of Rap Volume 1,” features eight tracks written, performed, and recorded by students. “I would say 60% of it was made here [at Community Prep] and then the other 35-40% was made at Anthem Music Enterprises, which is a production and development company that we partner with here in town,” said Kelly. “They signed me maybe two years ago and just been helping me raise my numbers, centralize my likeness, learn how to monetize. I’ve just kind of just been filtering my kids through them. You know what I mean? And they’ve helped with a lot of engineering on the album, just basic production and likenesses and monetization. They’re helping us get the shows, they’re helping with [media] attention.”
Since its release in May 2025, the album has received widespread attention. “It has been amazing,” said Kelly. “First week, we did a little over 20,000 streams across multiple platforms. Now we’re sitting at I think 50,000, pushing 60,000 streams across all platforms on the album itself. As far as bookings, we’re monetizing more than ever right now — we’re just getting booked for shows. It did get picked up by Roc Nation, so it’s just distributed through more digital streaming platforms On average, an independent artist can distribute to 28 to 35 platforms like YouTube, Spotify, Amazon. With Roc Nation, we distribute to like 300. We’re in Walmart play listing, Target play listing and then the video games — So 2K26, it’s a basketball game that came out last month, we have a song on there, and then the new Grand Theft Auto game that’ll be releasing.”
In addition to the commercial success, the School of Rap program offers students the opportunity to perform their songs for the public. “I hadn’t performed anywhere at all,” said Community Prep senior Kanash1 Ak1ra, one of the featured vocalists on School of Rap. “I had freestyled with my friends at a cafeteria and that was about it.”
Ak1ra has performed at crowds for local events like the Juneteenth festival and Concrete Couch’s Couchella festival. Under Kelly’s mentorship, students have begun to learn the ins and outs of the music industry. “Until I met KO, I wasn’t very confident in my ability to rap in front of people,” he said. “With friends, it was different. It’s five friends, half of us can’t rap, we’re all just freestyling in a circle. I’m not really worried about how I’m perceived, but I was in a room full of people who could actually put bars together really well, on the same level that I could, better than me, honestly. They were like, ‘You got to freestyle.’ And they made me freestyle. And after that, I got a little more comfortable recording and actually creating music the proper way. Because a lot of the time, I was just doing it on my phone.”
For Solanki, School of Rap is a perfect fit for Community Prep’s student population. “We are also what’s called an AEC, an alternative education campus, and that’s a separate law in Colorado,” he explained. “That’s defined as a school that serves at least 90% of the population in a high-risk category for dropping out of school — and that could be for 15 different reasons as the state defines it. It could be past problems with attendance, special education needs, mental health challenges, issues at home. We are officially an AEC by the state, so we are mandated to serve students who might not graduate otherwise.”
Solanki says that programs like School of Rap keep students engaged in education. “We are also what’s called a ‘Big Picture School,’ and Big Picture education came out of Rhode Island in the 90s, and it’s all over the country and all over world, and in fact, now here just in El Paso County — Aspen Valley in District 20, Patriot in District 49, Welte in District 8 are all Big Picture schools,” he said. “There’s 10 things that distinguish a big-picture school, and the main thing is student interest based education. So what are you about? What are you thinking about in your future? How do we make that what you’re spending your time doing? So School of Rap is a perfect example of that. Many kids over the years have said, ‘I want to be a rapper,’ but then my question is, ‘Do you know the pathway?’ Because it’s a pathway. It’s not just your fairy godmother coming with the magic wand. There’s work that you have to do, and you have a specific kind of work and [work] really hard. That’s never been known to people, and so what the School of Rap is a good example of is this model we’re taking, overall, as a school, as connecting students with people in the world who are doing that.”
Kelly is able to teach the students at Community Prep the realities of the music industry. “The game is changing,” he said. “My freshman year of high school, I was selling CDs. There is no such thing as a CD anymore. That took a huge piece of independent monetization away, and then the digital streaming platforms came around. Streams are worth nothing. I’ve done 100,000 streams and I got a check for like $35. 100,000 streams. If I sold 100,000 CDs, we might not be talking right now, you know?”
In addition to writing, recording, and performing, Kelly teaches students about the unnoticed aspects of working in the music industry — monetization and merchandizing. “How do you think of something to sell because your music can’t be sold nowadays,” he said. “It’s, ‘Can you create a merchandise item?’ Kanye West isn’t monetizing off music as much as he’s monetizing off his clothing. He has a brand, Yeezy. It’s excelling. It’s up there with the Louis Vuitton and Gucci, but he’s an artist. That’s what I’m working on with the kids. I stress about it a lot because the music is the foundation, and that’s where we connect really, and where the heart is, but that’s not where the money is. We work on monetizing the things that we want to do outside of music — sponsorships, getting free skateboards so we don’t have to pay for skateboards, getting free food from restaurants, and posting a reaction video so we don’t have to pay for food, getting free clothes because we’re modeling for different stores. It’s all monetization nowadays.”
For students like Ak1ra, School of Rap has opened up new possibilities for their future. “Community prep has definitely influenced where I’m going next in life,” he said. “Before, I didn’t really have a vision for where I was going in life, I just kind of thought, ‘We live, whatever happens, happens.’ But after coming to Community Prep, in the few years that I’ve been here, it kind of pushed me to actually pursue things in life that I originally viewed as arbitrary, like a diploma, for one, and two, social interaction. It definitely taught me how important social interaction is. I was very secluded when I first came here. This definitely got me to open up about the way I am a lot more. It’s definitely given me a vision on how to interact with people, how to be professional in an environment where it’s not entirely necessary, but it’s necessary to not swear every five seconds of your sentence. It taught me to communicate better for the future.”
School of Rap is currently working to secure a Grammy nomination. “We got invited and we submitted and we got accepted,” said Kelly, of the nomination process. “So now we’re probably against like a hundred people in our category.”
Whether the album secures enough votes for Grammy nomination or not, Solanki says the program has already proven its value to Community Prep students. “I always tell new students, this is a great example of project-based learning,” he said. “It’s got a real audience, it was building skills, it was working together, all these aspects that make project-based learning meaningful.”
Pikes Peak Bulletin Publisher Juaquin Mobley is a board member of Community Prep School.
