St. Joseph’s $7.5-Million Hoof Dreams

St. Joseph Ballet on Monday kicked off a $7.5-million capital campaign for a new building and endowment intended to vastly expand its highly respected dance program for at-risk youths.

“This is quite a milestone for St. Joseph Ballet,” founding artistic director Beth Burns said at a news conference in the Costa Mesa office of architect Ernesto Vasquez, who unveiled his model and designs for the project.

The 21,000-square-foot facility, to be built for $3.5 million on three lots at 19th and Main streets between the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art and its Kidseum, would be more than five times the size of the institution’s current home, 14 blocks away in Santa Ana’s Fiesta Marketplace.

With the three new dance studios (the school now has one), the 15-year-old operation would triple its weekly class count and boost the number of students in its year-round program from 300 to 500 by 2001, said officials, who hope to break ground this fall and complete the project 14 months later.

“We really have outgrown the space,” said Burns, explaining that the school turns away 30% of the youths, 9 to 18 years old, who apply for admission every six months.

A private funding drive has raised more than $3.5 million in cash and pledges toward its goal, about two-thirds of it for a $4-million endowment, said Orange County arts patron Joan Beall, a St. Joseph trustee who is co-chair of the campaign with her husband, Donald. The couple are among the drive’s major donors.

“This endeavor of St. Joseph Ballet is of the utmost importance to our community,” Joan Beall said. She added that the children who attend St. Joseph, most of them for free, typically belong to large families earning about $1,500 a month, yet are less prone to gang activity and crime than their peers.

Studios in the two-story building, designed with a soft, curving roof and a courtyard, will accommodate small recitals (the troupe now rents the Irvine Barclay Theatre for performances). An education center will mean expanded academic tutoring and computer training, and workshops for parents in such areas as job security and parenting skills, officials said.

“It’s not just for the kids at risk, it’s also for the family,” Vasquez said. “It’s [going to be] their home, it’s going to be their casa.”

The city of Santa Ana is donating a parcel of land on Main Street to St. Joseph, which has paid a private owner $325,000 to purchase the other two. One of those lots is occupied, but the city is exercising its power of eminent domain and will relocate the site’s nearly 14 commercial and residential tenants by the end of June, John Reekstin, a manager with the city’s Community Development Agency, said by phone.

The planned facility “is a real positive for the city,” said Reekstin, noting its location within Santa Ana’s growing arts corridor, which is bordered by the planned Discovery Science Center to the north and the downtown Artists Village to the south.

St. Joseph officials expect to double the organization’s 12-member staff and $545,000 annual operating budget by 2001, yet still be able to offer 95% of their students scholarships with interest from the planned endowment, they said.

Burns, who opened the ballet school in a Santa Ana church basement in 1989 before moving to Fiesta Marketplace, said she visited professional ballet schools across the country to research the project and believes the new school would be the largest of its kind in the nation.

Last week, St. Joseph released results of a study it commissioned indicating that the training it provides greatly benefits at-risk youths.

UC Irvine researchers found that high-school age, long-term participants in the program, the cornerstone of which is ballet classes, are less likely than their peers to use alcohol or drugs or engage in sexual activity.

Researchers also found that participants are three times more likely to believe in the importance of spending at least an hour a day on homework and that the program “has a profound and positive effect on the lives of those children who join the ballet.”