L.A.’s School for the Arts Auditions for a Long Run

‘I thought they must have heard me (praying) and opened the school for me.’

--Aaron Flagg

Arts school student

One day not long ago, a Big Man On Campus, with three admiring girls on each side of him, strode down the walkways of Los Angeles County’s newest high school, cradling in his arm, not a football helmet, but a violin case.

The teacher who watched him saunter by simply shook her head and marveled. At her old high school--at any other high school in Los Angeles--a teen-age boy with a violin . . . well, she shrugged, the reaction is better left unspoken.

But this is the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, the long-awaited public school to groom promising students in dance, visual arts, theater and music. A semester into its existence under the Los Angeles County Office of Education, it is in its shakedown phase, and, says principal Charles Stewart, “We’re still shaking.”

Its 216 students from all over the county--some of whom must rise at 4 a.m. and take jostling, 90-minute RTD bus rides to class--love it.

“I thought they must have heard me (praying) and opened the school for me,” beams Aaron Flagg, a 16-year-old trumpet player from Baldwin Park High, where, he said, “as long as you played loud, that was what they wanted.”

Its teachers--one of whom scrounges unabashedly in paint store trash cans after church on Sundays for art supplies--love it.

“I actually have students asking questions here, and that never happened before,” marvels veteran biology teacher Phyllis McQuery. “I’m not saying they’re all A students . . . but they’re all interested. “

But like young newlyweds, the school is living somewhat precariously, on a lot of love and a shoestring budget. Operating on grace-and-favor campus space at California State University, Los Angeles, and running many programs on money from a state start-up grant scheduled to expire next year, the school that they hoped would flourish overnight in the Entertainment Capital of the World is stumping hard for contributions.

A glowing six-figure forecast has only reached about $70,000 in cash and in-kind donations--including $21,000 from singer Barry Manilow and the local National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, smaller sums from parents, spare costumes from a film company and free reception food from Irvine Ranch Markets.

For the time being for these 10th- and 11th-graders from 30 school districts--tough ghetto schools, costly private schools and everything in between--the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts itself is enough.

In the same classroom and studio space used by college students at night, the 10th- and 11th-graders face five rigorous hours of academics, then three strenuous hours of their chosen art. No proms, no yearbook, no basketball games--well, not yet, is the upbeat rejoinder.

Comparisons to the television show “Fame”--the fictionalized account of the New York arts school in which students dance on the table tops--are inevitable, but mention it and the adults wince.

The “Fame” image “is what we’re fighting every day,” says theater arts head Susan Stauter, who did not know whether to laugh or cry when a student remarked imperiously that she did not see why she had to learn breathing and diction techniques since she was going to be a film actress.

Not surprisingly, many of the dance students arrived not knowing a ballet plie from a pie plate--and resentful that anyone expected them to learn.

“I didn’t like ballet. It was the last thing on my list,” says jazz dancer Alonzo Flournoy, who for months refused on principle to wear ballet tights and showed up in Maui shorts. “I still don’t, but the way (part-time instructor Don) Hewitt is teaching it makes me want to learn. It’s helped me so much.”

Unable to Read Music

Some music students came here unable to read music; many memorized their audition songs from MTV.

“We say you have to be educated and have the basics before you can go out and be a star,” Stewart says. “Some of the students had an idea this would be instant success or stardom for them, when in fact it’s a long hard road and requires a lot of experience and a lot of work.”

Says junior Lisa Leieritz, a Cerritos dance student: “They told us the first month, ‘You’re not the stars of your studio any more.’ ”

Although some complain that the college-prep academics are too easy and the arts instruction not as good as private lessons, others have been overwhelmed by the demands of rehearsals, commuting, and keeping the required C average. Dancer Nancy McKeever, 15, says sardonically: “Weekend? What’s a weekend?”

Art sophomore Denise Saffren, 15, knows that she is floundering in algebra, “but I know I’m trying to do something about it. Other kids, they just say, ‘I’m having problems; I’m going to leave.’ I’ve learned more in one semester here than all my years of art classes. . . . I’d probably have rotted in my old school.”

So far, only 14 students have taken Stauter’s advice: “If you can’t take it, beam back to your mother ship.”

Things are falling into place. Several art students exhibited their jewelry and heard it praised by people from the Chicago Art Institute. The music students are set to go to Lincoln Center in April to sing for a Statue of Liberty 100th birthday bash.

Of the 216 students, about 15% are visual artists, 25% dancers, 35% in theater, 25% in music. Three-fourths are girls.

$1.2-Million Budget

This year’s school budget is $1.2 million; the state start-up grant of $477,000 takes care of much of that, but that ends next year. The school largely depends on the average $2,800 per student in state funds alloted every California public school.

There may be a pinch of lottery money, a dash of textbook funds to help out, but the chief burden of making up the difference falls on the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts Foundation. The private, nonprofit foundation exists to raise the money that will enable the school for the arts to be more than just a public high school with some art classes. The foundation is turning to the local arts community for help.

Robert Fitzpatrick, president of California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, a man in touch with the arts in Los Angeles and the father of a high school for the arts student, knows the kind of money it takes to run a quality arts program. It is not enough, he says, to simply will the school into existence and trust it to prosper.

“If the school doesn’t make it, it’s one of the more devastating comments about our priorities as a city and punctures one of our illusions about how far we’ve come and how much we’ve done,” Fitzpatrick says. “This is a major opportunity for Los Angeles, and we might blow it.”

Driving around after church one recent Sunday, Joe Gatto, who heads the high school for the arts’s visual arts program, came upon a treasure: a cache of quality cardboard, discarded behind an art school. He piled it into his car--the same car he uses to scour the trash heaps at paint stores--and brought it to class, to the delight of students who may never have worked with anything bigger than a sheet of notebook paper.

A dynamo in a spattered lab apron, Gatto, like the other three arts program directors here, is devoted to showing his students that their talent is worth expending on more than pep rallies. “Before,” he says, “we were the ones who made the 20-foot-long football banner, working all week to have some ‘gruntbrain’ run through it on Friday night.”

So this new school, which culminates five years of dreaming and meetings by people ranging from Supervisor Mike Antonovich and Performing Arts Council President Michael Newton to Music Center Educational Division Director Joan Boyett, is “a paradise” for Gatto.

Eleven on Faculty

The four arts program directors chosen to join the full-time faculty of seven academic teachers--all 11 winnowed from 400 applicants--are all scavenging, in their own ways, for space, for time, for extra programs for their students.

They reel in old debts, or even dig into their own pockets, for things they consider crucial. Dance department head Don Bondi brought guest speakers from the Dance Theatre of Harlem. Music Center ties got the students to free Philharmonic rehearsals and the Joffrey Ballet. The Doolittle Theatre gave discounts to the gospelized Oedipus tragedy, “The Gospel at Colonus.”

The speakers and the theater tickets are part of what an arts school should offer routinely, but the school is still too new to have those mechanisms well established. So the arts instructors say they sometimes perform “end runs” around one of the most paperwork-conscious of systems, the public schools.

That illustrates the tension implicit in running an outfit that demands rules, yet desires the spontaneity of the arts.

“We’re a small school in danger sometimes of being called an elitist school,” Principal Stewart says. “But we’re only elitist in that we are choosing certain kinds of students to come here.”

Yet Fitzpatrick observes: “Aristotle said that true equality consists of treating unequal people unequally. Unless one grasps and accepts that, I don’t think you can make this school work. To try to spend only as much for the students in this school as one spends per student in every other school is meaningless. It costs more to teach music; it costs more to teach dance or theater.”

‘A Crown Jewel’

For the school to flourish, “it’s going to have to have more protection from the equality syndrome. . . . This is a crown jewel, not some sort of aberration or bizarre experiment,” and the school must “find ways around the bureaucracy,” he says.

That is where the school’s foundation, headed by Antonovich, comes in.

“It’s to provide the extras so it’ll become a better school than it would without the money,” says Richard Hansen, the foundation’s chief fiscal officer and director of the Educational Foundation of America, which donated $300,000 so the foundation itself could begin. Without those extras, it risks being “not . . . a bad school, but just . . . a sort of average school.”

Public schools have rarely had to make cocktail party small talk to raise money, since their funds are one of the first slices cut from a government budget pie.

“Public school people don’t know what public relations and fund-raising are,” complains one insider to the fund-raising process.

Because of that, he argues, the foundation was encumbered by internal debate and the school’s momentum was lost. “I don’t think they’ve gotten the exposure and generated the excitement they should.”

The “point woman” now is Cheryl Mollicone, a musician and a vivacious graduate of the vaunted New York school who took over as executive director of the foundation in September.

“We all wish we’d been able to raise a lot of money a lot faster, but that’s not the world’s easiest task,” Hansen says.

Optimistic on Fund Raising

But Mollicone is optimistic. “Now, we have a product; there is a school. We have lots of leads and are trying to make as much personal contact as possible” with potential donors--including her fellow New York alumni.

Antonovich agrees: “I think nowadays more people understand that we have to develop outside fund raising for schools, and this is no exception for schools of the arts.”

But they do have a school--on borrowed space.

Cal State Chancellor W. Ann Reynolds and Cal State L.A. President James M. Rosser, who is eager to draw arts programs to his school, volunteered the most centrally located campus in Los Angeles.

Although the four arts departments are still short of equipment, supplies and space, the dovetailing of high school and college students, day and evening classrooms, has been working reasonably well.

Not all artists in Los Angeles are unaware of the school. Actor William Allen Young, whose resume boasts credits like “Jagged Edge,” spent three hours with drama students recently, making them laugh with Dr. Seuss, bringing them to tears with “The Great White Hope,” and laying it on the line about hard work and commitment.

Those three hours were important to the students--and to Young, who says such contacts “give the art a sense of reality. Other than that we’re all just watching movies.”

At the sensitive high school age, when it is agony to be different and a thousand deaths to be laughed at, the sense of relief among these students, who at their old schools were often considered “peculiar,” is tangible.

“I had friends at my other school, but not supportive friends,” says music junior Arlan Feiles, 16. “I’d say, ‘Come see my band tonight,’ and they’d say no, then they’d say, ‘He’s so conceited about being in a band.’ I got the full cold shoulder.

“There’s no such thing as alienation at this school. People cheer you on. Last year, my grades sucked. I had 80-some absences; I just couldn’t handle it. Now I’m getting straight A’s, running for student body president--I can’t see it getting any better.”

The rock ‘n’ roll devotee who cannot sit down without tapping out rhythms on any available surface has just discovered the abstract music of Arnold Schoenberg.

Outsiders Are Insiders

All those pent-up feelings have been let out; the outsiders are now insiders. The dance students practically prance down the narrow halls, their arms draped around one another. The music students sing Christmas carols a cappella at their lockers. The student who pierced his nose in algebra one morning because he was bored--and now wears a paper clip through it--is just one of the guys.

“My friend said if she’d worn (that day’s ensemble) at her old high school, people would be laughing,” says dance student Rebecca Cherkoss, 16.

The choices make them almost giddy. Hollie Sobray paused in the midst of jewelry-making, something she had never thought to do before.

“When I came here, I was so sure of myself,” she says. “I wanted to be an architect or interior designer. Now I have no direction. I mean, I change my mind all the time.”

The challenge is why teachers came here, too--for small class sizes and bright students whose questions often send teachers back to the books for answers.

To social studies teacher Caroline Hinckley, “it would be criminal of us to lower our standards on the assumption that every single one of them will make it in the arts field,” just as few high school players make it into pro football. “Otherwise those kids may end up with nothing.”

Hinckley was seeking “a lot more sense of intellectual challenge than I was getting. That’s not to say it was bad at South Gate; we were turning out a lot of nice kids, not necessarily neurosurgeons--or artists. Here, I feel a satisfaction I haven’t had in a long time,” along with a satisfying fatigue at day’s end. “Before, it was fatigue brought on by frustration. I don’t find that frustration here.”

Artistic in Academics

The students’ artistic bent pops up in class. When English teacher David Doty taught American Indian literature, one student wrote a piano suite of Indian music. A drama student put out the lights, made the others sit in a circle around him and played “Chief,” telling legends.

History class book reports on biographies became monologues, with students taking on the characters of Willa Cather, Truman Capote, Machiavelli. When Hinckley taught the Missouri Compromise, students set up an anachronistic “remote TV” interview of statesman Henry Clay, who held an umbrella as another student pumped a squirt gun--it was raining at the capital that day, they explained solemnly. “With latitude, they’re irrepressible,” says Doty.

These are students who hurry to class, who often beg for essay questions and even groan when the class hour ends.

They regret most that they cannot take more arts classes; as it is set up, music students cannot wander into art, drama students cannot “minor” in dance. There isn’t the money; there isn’t the time.

“I’ll probably get assassinated for this,” says Tom Burkhart, 16, of Covina, “but I wish there were more hours of arts classes--which means a longer day.”