Research on community music (Bartleet, 2023), Hip-Hop Based Music Education (Kruse, 2016), and culturally sustaining pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 2017) highlights how popular music making can serve as a powerful tool for engagement, learning, identity-formation, and well-being. Quebec has the highest school dropout rate in Canada (15.6%), with Montreal’s rate even higher at 18.2% (Québec, 2021). Traditional educational models often fail to respond to the lived realities of socially marginalized youth. Building on over a decade of collaboration with the High School for Recording Arts (HSRA) in Minnesota (Seidel, Simmons, and Lipset, 2022), an internationally recognized pioneer in school dropout prevention and reengagement—our work adapts their innovative approaches to the Montreal educational context. This paper presents findings from Projet 4, a new education non-profit forged through a research-practice partnership (Penuel and Gallagher, 2017) between HSRA and McGill researchers. In Winter 2015, Projet 4 piloted two 12 week bilingual public recording arts alternative secondary school programs, housed in popular youth-serving recording studios: NBS Studio in Côte-des-Neiges and Pour la Cause in Montréal-Nord. The focus of our study is how music-centered, project-based education can reengage youth who are disengaged from formal schooling and support their learning, well-being, and educational pathways. Our bilingual (French-English) data on the two pilot programs includes student music, and interviews with all participants -- 4 recording studio facilitators, 20 students, and 4 academic educators -- about student experiences and learning. Our analysis is guided by community-based research principles and informed by Hip-Hop Education (Laforgue-Bullido, 2024; Gosine and Tabi, 2016; Laniel-Tremblay and Low, 2021). Preliminary findings suggest that embedding education within community recording studios creates powerful conditions for school engagement. Students reported increased motivation when learning was tied to music-making and production, as well as gains in agency and feelings of belonging. For some students, the confidence they got from the studio rekindled their interest in school subjects. Many youth were more willing to articulate personal and social issues through songwriting and collaborative projects, which also fostered critical reflection on race, class, and cultural identity. By centering music and recording arts within alternative high school programs, this project demonstrates how community music practices and Hip-Hop pedagogy can transform disengaged students’ relationships to learning. For music education, the implications are significant: reimagining classrooms as creative, culturally sustaining spaces positions music not only as enrichment but as a foundation for academic learning, educational equity and innovation.