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Orange County School of the Arts Expands to the San Gabriel Valley
Education Oct 20, 2016
- Photo by Terry Miller / Beacon Media News
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Students from California School of the Arts. – Courtesy photo
By May S. Ruiz
Duarte Unified School District’s (DUSD) commitment to arts programs will have its most tangible evidence yet when the California School of the Arts-San Gabriel Valley (CSArts-SGV)opens its doors next year as a public charter school of the DUSD, operating from the current Northview Intermediate School campus. The first sister school to the Orange County School of the Arts (OCSA) in Santa Ana, CSArts-SGV is a partnership that is expected to benefit children in Duarte and the surrounding region.
“The choice of housing CSArts-SGV at Northview was based on the interest of our community to support the concept of neighborhood schools,” declares DUSD superintendent, Dr. Allan Mucerino. “In addition, we identified grades 7-8 as the point in time when 70% of our students of residence who transferred out of our district exited DUSD. As a result, we chose to reconfigure from K-6 to K-8 schools. That provided us the opportunity to repurpose Northview by entering into a license agreement with OCSA to create CSArts-SGV.”
This grade level reconfiguration will also necessitate a bit of relocation for current students. Dr. Mucerino explains, “Starting in the 2017-2018 school year current sixth graders will remain on their present campus for seventh grade. Current seventh grade students will be housed in a satellite eighth grade facility between the existing Northview campus and Duarte High School for one year. In 2018-2019, the conversion to K-8 will be complete.”
Dr. Ralph Opacic, who founded OCSA in 1987, explains the decision to expand to the San Gabriel Valley. “The OCSA is celebrating its 30th anniversary and we are now at capacity at 2,200 students. We attract 3,000 applicants each year for 400 spots from cities not only in Orange County, but also from adjacent Los Angeles, Riverside and San Diego counties. And so we began looking at areas where our program will have an appeal. The San Gabriel Valley quickly came to our attention as we know it will draw from the entire region. We’re likewise having conversations with school districts in the South Bay, at El Segundo, and the San Fernando Valley.”
“This is the first sister school of OCSA and is modeled after it,” continues Dr. Opacic. “Our goal is in ten years to be able to provide 10,000 kids who are passionate for the arts with a transformational experience. We want to offer a culture where they are surrounded by like-minded students; to afford them an academic preparation combined with an arts curriculum so they can continue on a path. But it isn’t a program to educate talented students to become future artists. Rather, it’s an innovative school environment that graduates highly engaged, creative young leaders who are well-equipped for meaningful, successful lives at the college of their choice and in any career they select. ”
Dr. Opacic describes, “Students will have the academic portion of their day from 8am to 2 pm consisting of three 90-minute classes and a 30-minute tutorial block. CSArts-SGV will offer college preparatory, honors and advanced placement courses taught by fully credentialed faculty members, with the majority of them holding advanced degrees.
Then high school arts students will be attending their choice of art course from 2:30 to 5pm. Conservatory for students in the seventh and eighth grade is scheduled prior to the high school conservatory. We’ll be offering ten arts classes – acting, classical and contemporary dance, classical voice, commercial dance, creative writing, instrumental music, integrated arts, musical theatre, production and design, and visual arts.”
The opening of CSArts-SGV will bring in more jobs into the city. Dr. Opacic reveals, “We currently have job postings for the eight full-time arts teachers and will be interviewing within the next four to six weeks. We will be hiring academic and arts instructors after March 1st next year when we have an idea of what our enrollment will be. We hope to open grades seven to ten at 200 students per grade level. We staff our academic programs at 30:1 so we’ll probably have 20 -27 academic educators and we staff the arts programs at 20:1 we we’ll probably have 40 arts teachers in the afternoon conservatory.”
According to Dr. Mucerino, the presence of CSArts-SGV in Duarte will infuse additional funding. He says of the amount of Average Daily Attendance (ADA) revenue generated by 1,200 students in grades 9-12, three percent will go towards DUSD.
Dr. Opacic will serve as the executive director of the California School of the Arts, which is the umbrella company for all schools they open going forward. As a charter school, CSArts-SGV will have its own board of directors, independent of Duarte Unified School District (DUSD), which is its sponsoring agency.
CSArts-SGV’s first principal will be Dr. William Wallace, who was Dean of Facilities and Supervision at OCSA, where he oversaw the expansion of the school from 1,800 students to its current size of nearly 2,200. He also assisted in supervising the construction of OCSA’s premier dance, music and science building, which was inaugurated in August of 2015; he also served as OCSA’s Assistant Principal of Student Services.
Abbe Levine will come on board as the Dean of Arts Conservatories, having served as Director of Arts Environment and Program Expansion at OCSA. She has been teaching at OCSA since 2004 until she became Co-Director of the Creative Writing Conservatory. In that post she implemented innovative community programming and collaborative arts projects.
Dr. Mucerino has been an ardent supporter of arts programs and this partnership is the culmination of his months-long search for a genuine alliance. He says, “OCSA has created the blueprint for an innovative school that has proven that arts and creative educational experiences transform schools and communities. The evidence is powerful: children of all social and economic levels who experience high levels of art engagement have more positive outcomes in virtually every achievement indicator, compared to students who are not as lucky. Creative thinking and innovation are at the core of advancement in today’s globalized world. This unique public school/charter school partnership is an example of how historically polarized forces can work together to challenge the status quo and create exceptional and flourishing learning environments.
Over 1,000 people have already signed up for the first preview day on October 22. Judging from that level of interest, it’s going to be as popular as the original Orange County School of the Arts. But what’s truly unique about this partnership is that it includes an opportunity for students in grades seven and eight to attend DUSD K-8 schools to prepare for CSArts-SGV by participating in the same conservatory program currently delivered to seventh and eighth graders in OCSA. The conservatory for seventh to eighth grade students will be on the CSArts-SGV campus in the same facility used for the 9-12 conservatory program and taught by the same instructors.”
Additional public preview dates are scheduled for December 10 and January 21, 2017.
Students in Duarte and in the entire San Gabriel Valley are the fortunate recipients of education leaders’ out-of-the-box approach to teaching. Dr. Mucerino says it best when he quips, “There’s never been a better time to be a kid in Duarte.”
VISIT: http://csarts.net/LearnMore/
