The day the music teachers heard the Toon Shop was going out of business, there was a panic.

“We didn’t know what was going on,” said Rick Janssen, who has taught piano lessons in the studios underneath the old Toon Shop space for decades. “There was all this talk about, ‘Take pictures of all the equipment in your rooms, because the bank may be coming to take everything.’”

Fast forward four months, and the music teachers have not only weathered a storm, they’ve set themselves up to continue offering music lessons to Prairie Village-area students for years to come.

In February, more than 40 of the music teachers banded together and formed an LLC, Village Music Academy, which assumed the lease of the basement space that had been held by the Toon Shop. Just two of the teachers who taught in the space left the group, Janssen said.

“We all wanted to figure something out,” he said, “We still had 900 students on the books, and we didn’t see any reason not to keep the operation going pretty much how it had been.”

From students’ perspectives, the experience is essentially the same. But for the teachers, the change has required that they pick up a number of responsibilities that had been managed by the Toon Shop in the past.

“We’re cleaning the bathrooms and buying supplies ourselves,” Janssen said. “All of the administrative stuff is on us now.”