A woman walks into the Mandeville Post Office carrying two $20 bills and a dream.
With the first, she purchased a mailbox. With the second, paper supplies.
She printed flyers, slipped them onto doors, and carried them through parking lots, churches, and Pelican Park.
Then she waited.
Her name is Leslie Domingues, and that was twenty-nine years ago.
Today, her dream has evolved into Northlake Academy of Music, the most popular children’s music education program on the Northshore.
With 52 teachers, hundreds of students, three locations, including a new Metairie campus opened this summer, Northlake has become a full musical pathway, from Tots-N-Tunes and summer camps to private lessons, recitals, voice ensemble, rock bands, piano, strings, brass, woodwinds, guitar, and drums.
A Dream Sketched on the Floor
Leslie did not set out to build an academy.
She was an elementary school teacher with two education degrees—one in special education—and a lifelong love of piano. She had taken lessons from age seven to eighteen, then began teaching music on the side while raising her family.
But the standard thirty-minute lesson felt too short.
“I wanted to develop a program for preschoolers with live music and movement,” she said.
She took the idea to Northshore Werlein’s Music, a local store already woven into her family history. Her grandmother had played piano there, and her grandfather had sold sheet music there.
The manager gave her a breakroom the size of a closet. Leslie decorated it, hired a fiddler, and called it Tots-N-Tunes.
Families began asking for piano teachers, then guitar, choir, and strings.
The first studio became too small almost immediately, and so did the next. Eventually, Leslie bought a tired Mandeville building. With her husband’s help and young Allie beside her, she gutted it, rebuilt it, and mapped its future with painter’s tape on the floor.
On opening weekend, Leslie photographed a rainbow bending over the new school like a bright, improbable promise of beautiful things to come.
Do Children Need Music?
Children eight and under now spend about two and a half hours each day consuming screen media. Much of childhood arrives glowing, frictionless, and preloaded. A child can tap a screen and hear almost anything.
But what benefits come from creating music themselves?
Northlake answers with a full pathway.
Tunes Together welcomes babies and parents. Tots-N-Tunes introduces ages two to five to live music and movement. Mother’s Day Out folds music, art, and nature into the school day. From there, students move into Piano Pals, private lessons, voice ensemble, summer camps, rock bands, recitals, and instruction across the major instruments.
But the instrument is only part of the point.
“They’re learning a life skill you can’t learn on the phone,” Leslie says. “Coordination. Patience. Focus. Confidence. The humility to fail. The courage to try again.”
Research increasingly supports what Leslie has spent nearly three decades watching firsthand: early music training can strengthen executive function, working memory, cognitive flexibility, language development, and self-control, especially in preschool-aged children.
For Leslie, love is the goal, not competition.
“I want each student to develop a love and a passion for music,” she says. “They will carry music with them for the rest of their lives.”
Mother’s Day Out
Private lessons at Northlake are built for children and adults, beginners and advanced students, with 30- to 60-minute instruction. The studios have glass doors so parents can watch learning happen in real time.
Teachers use theory games, flashcards, enrichment books, and “music money” to make practice feel earned rather than forced. Young students cash in dollars for prizes. Older ones save for Starbucks or Target gift cards.
But the real currency at Northlake is culture.
As Mother’s Day Out Director, Allie Burbrink brings that same precision to early childhood. Children move from live music to Montessori-inspired centers, homemade Play-Doh, herb gardens, percussion baskets, and outdoor play.
“Our three pillars are music, art, and nature,” Allie says. “Everything we do here intentionally points to these.”
Grace Notes
“What happens when students grow up?” I ask. “Do they ever return?”
“They return,” Leslie says. “And many of them work here.”
Grace Romano is one of them.
She came at 12, shy enough that her teacher had to coax out the song. Now studying music education, she hopes to give children what her teachers gave her.
“This place means safety to be who I am,” she says, “to express myself, to create, to learn, and to become who I’m meant to be.”
I ask if she’d be comfortable singing something.
She chooses Judy Garland.
“Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”
A Way Home
Equally colorful is the large painting hanging in the waiting room. Leslie made it with her mother, Inez, after Hurricane Katrina. Look closely, and instruments appear inside the texture: saxophone, harmonica, triangle, hidden marks of music waiting to be found.
The painting connects to Musicians’ Village, the New Orleans effort that helped bring displaced musicians home after the storm.
And perhaps that is what music does best.
It gathers what has scattered and gives feeling a shape. Music teaches children how to listen, how to begin, how to stand before others without vanishing and make sense of themselves and the world.
That was Leslie Domingues’s vision when she walked into the post office nearly three decades ago with $40 in her hand. And somewhere along the way—somewhere over the rainbow—she built what every good song is trying to find.
A way home.
“I want each student to develop a love and a passion for music. They will carry music with them for the rest of their lives.”
Northlake Academy of Music offers private lessons, Tots-N-Tunes, Tunes Together, Mother’s Day Out, Piano Pals, voice ensemble, camps, workshops, and modern band programs at its Mandeville campus, with sister locations in Lakeview and Old Metairie. Contact Northlake at (985) 778-0786, info@northlakeacademyofmusic.net, or northlakeacademyofmusic.net, and follow @northlakeacademyofmusic, @totsntunesmdo, and northlakeacademyofmusic on Facebook for updates, registration details, and recital information.