Principal, executive director named for new arts high school

Months behind schedule and under withering criticism, Los Angeles school officials have selected a leadership team for a new downtown arts high school that is intended to become a national model for teaching dance, theater, music and visual arts to underprivileged students.

After a lengthy and ultimately fruitless nationwide search, Los Angeles Unified School District officials turned inward to find a principal and an executive director for the school, which occupies a striking $232-million campus overlooking the 101 Freeway downtown. The new team announced Friday -- Principal Suzanne Blake from Vista Middle School in Panorama City and Executive Director Rex Patton from Coeur D’Alene Elementary School in Venice -- faces a daunting task.

In little more than four months, Blake and Patton are expected to hire a teaching staff; finish designing a curriculum; plot out a schedule; evaluate students; reach out to private donors and partners; and open in time for the beginning of the school year in September. Unlike the outsiders who were considered by the district, Blake and Patton have no experience running performing arts schools.

“I look forward to the challenge,” Blake said at a news conference at the school, noting that other district officials had been working for “many, many months” to lay the groundwork.

Supt. Ramon C. Cortines had said he wanted leaders in place at least a year before the school opened. An executive director was hired last summer but quit a short time later, and a national search for a principal foundered after two high-profile candidates from prominent East Coast arts schools were offered the job and backed out.

Critics, including philanthropist Eli Broad, a driving force behind the school, suggested that the district postpone the opening for a year and consider turning the campus over to a charter school operator. “The best thing that could happen would be if everyone cooled their heels,” Broad said recently. “There’s no need to open this school right now.”

But both Cortines and local district superintendent Richard Alonzo insist that they can open the school on time under district management, not as a charter school.

“I don’t know what we’d gain by waiting,” Alonzo said, “other than letting charters impose their will on it.”

In Blake and Patton, Los Angeles Unified is getting veteran educators from very different backgrounds.

Blake’s school, Vista, is relatively low-performing, as measured by standardized test scores, with a student population that is more than 90% poor and Latino, not unlike most of the students expected at the new arts school. Its Academic Performance Index, based on test scores, was 614 last year, below the district average.

Blake opened Vista five years ago, and district officials said her experience opening a new school was crucial. She has training as a dancer and is married to a jazz pianist, Mitchel Forman.

Patton’s school, Coeur D’Alene, is far more diverse ethnically and economically and has a reputation for intertwining the arts, technology and academics. In a decade as principal, Patton has helped drive it to some of the city’s highest test scores, with an API of 884, more than 200 points above the district average.

Patton “has done amazing things,” said Marco Petruzzi, a parent of two children at Coeur D’Alene and chief executive of Green Dot Public Schools, one of the largest charter school groups in the city. He said he recommended Patton for the job. Patton, he said, had such a talent for fundraising that Coeur D’Alene seemed like a private school.

The arts school will have two top officers so the principal can concentrate on academics while the executive director focuses on outside fundraising and building bridges to local arts organizations.

Known officially as High School No. 9, the campus has a tortuous political history. It is among several schools long promised to students in the area, once served solely by the badly overcrowded Belmont High School. Cortines and Alonzo have insisted that, above all, it should be a neighborhood school serving one of city’s poorest areas.

Broad intervened early in the planning process, however, and pushed for it to become an arts school that would attract students citywide. Although Cortines said Friday that the school is no longer needed to relieve overcrowding, the district has set aside 1,200 of its 1,700 seats for students in the immediate neighborhood; the rest will be recruited citywide. Most of the students have already been selected for this fall. All will study an arts-based curriculum.

In addition to Blake and Patton, Alonzo has hired assistant principals to oversee music and theater arts instruction and a lead teacher to head the visual arts department. All came from L.A. Unified schools and say they are determined to foster success.

“I get emotional when I think of what this school is going to be,” said Yolanda Gardea, who came from North Hollywood High School and will head the music program. “By the time this ninth-grade class graduates, it’s going to be an amazing thing, and four years after that, it’ll be off the charts. Mark my words.”

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mitchell.landsberg@latimes.com