A Chance to Be Evaluated

Since 1980, elementary school students have had the opportunity to be evaluated for gifted abilities in the visual and performing arts, and Dixie Canyon is one of the few grade schools in the Valley with a coordinator for children who show talent in the performing arts.

“Dixie Canyon stands out because of its huge ongoing performing arts component,” says Sheila Smith, coordinator for the L.A. Unified School District’s gifted-talented programs, adding that most schools can’t afford staff members to identify students gifted in acting, singing, dancing or art and work with them to develop their talents.

The school is given $65 a year for each of its 10 students who are officially identified by the district as being talented in the performing arts. The school’s booster club organizes fund-raising activities and raises about $6,000 a year to finance school productions and pay for a coordinator for students gifted in performing arts.

As that coordinator, Sue Robinson, who also runs Dixie’s performing arts program, identifies children who show signs of excelling in drama, singing and dancing and prepares them for one of the twice-yearly “auditions” the school district schedules to single out gifted children.

“I teach them monologues and we play theater games,” says Robinson, who spends an hour every Monday after school with 20 students that she and Dixie Canyon teachers have identified as showing talent.

If the school district determines that those students are gifted in the performing arts, they see Robinson every Friday after class to practice more advanced acting exercises. Or parents may put their children on the hopelessly long waiting list of more than 1,100 students who want to get into the 32nd Street Elementary magnet school in Los Angeles for the visual and performing arts, where theater, drama, dance, video, art and design occupy a major part of the curriculum.

But those Dixie Canyon students gifted in the performing arts don’t have to leave home to receive good training in drama, dancing or singing, according to the school’s principal from 1986 to July, 1991. Says Bob Fishman, who put into place the school’s organized system for staging productions: “It is a very unique program to the point that performing arts magnets were interested in how we did our program.”