At a warehouse in an industrial corridor of downtown Los Angeles, a handful of technicians are hunched over their brightly lit workstations, tinkering with saxophones, violins, and pianos.

This facility is one of the only remaining publicly funded repair shops for musical instruments in the country. Thousands of cases lay neatly stacked across tall shelves, ready to be shipped to schools across the nation's second largest school district, Los Angeles Unified (LAUSD). These district-owned instruments and the repairs are a free service to students here.

"The shop is a jewel for the school district," says Steve Bagmanyan, who started here in 2003 as a piano technician and now supervises the shop.

In a school district where about 80% of students come from low-income backgrounds, the repa

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