Curtains rise on new Gwinnett arts school

Kaitlyn Horn, 15, wants to be a chorus teacher when she grows up. So when she heard of the new School of the Arts on the campus of Central Gwinnett High School, she signed up to audition without missing a beat.

“Now I know there’s no perfect equation to music,” said Kaitlyn, a freshman at the school, while rehearsing a song from the musical “Six.”

“I’m so glad that I got the opportunity to do this,” she said.

The school opened this fall after more than a decade of planning and $15 million to renovate and build an extension on the Central Gwinnett campus.

“We can go back 15, 20 years,” said David DuBose, director of fine arts for Gwinnett County Public Schools, on a recent episode of the school district’s podcast. “This has been a conversation piece that has been very important to our community and to our school district.”

Credit: Ben Gray

Credit: Ben Gray

The school district spent another $1.1 million hiring 12 new employees for the school, including teachers with experience in the arts industry.

About 350 students now attend the School of the Arts from all over Gwinnett County. About half are freshmen and sophomores in the selective conservatory program, which requires auditions, portfolios and juried interviews. The rest are “fellows,” Gwinnett students who want the opportunity to take more arts classes.

Conservatory students take core academic classes at Central Gwinnett High or online, and use all their electives to spend up to 20 hours a week studying their chosen arts. Concentrations include visual arts, dance, music technology, theater and voice.

The goal of the conservatory program is to prepare students for continuing education or careers in the arts, Principal Shane Orr said. Some will likely end up being performers, while others might teach, write music, work on sound systems or design theater sets.

The School of the Arts will support the arts community in Gwinnett County, where about 11,000 workers are in arts-related jobs, higher than the average national percentage, DuBose said.

Plans are in the works for students to intern at venues such as the nearby Aurora Theatre in Lawrenceville, train at the Atlanta Institute of Music and Media, work on sound systems for churches or build sets for the Georgia Film Academy, he said.

Students benefit from arts education whether or not they pursue careers in the field, he added. Research consistently shows higher graduation rates and lower discipline rates for students who participate in the arts.

Credit: Ben Gray

Credit: Ben Gray

“It just helps students learn about themselves, about the community, about a skill set that they would otherwise not have,” DuBose said.

The city of Lawrenceville, which owns the Aurora Theatre’s facility, contributed $5 million to build the School of the Arts — the first time any Gwinnett city has donated construction funds to the school system.

Lawrenceville leaders have long emphasized the arts in downtown revitalization efforts, City Manager Chuck Warbington said. The city just opened the Lawrenceville Arts Center, where School of the Arts students will be able to perform and showcase their work, he said. The city is also partnering with the school to create murals and other art in parks and public spaces, he said.

“It was a win-win for both entities and we’re seeing the effect of it in a short period of time since they opened,” Warbington said.

The new School of the Arts building is 31,000 square feet and houses all of Central Gwinnett’s fine arts classes.

In designing the facility and the program, officials looked at similar schools in Augusta, Cobb, DeKalb and Fulton Counties, as well as prestigious far-flung examples such as Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Dallas and ChiArts in Chicago.

On one recent day, the School of the Arts conservatory students prepared for semester finals. In a large, carpeted room, theater students practiced monologues and wheeled in a costume rack. In another room, about 25 students sat in small groups painting watercolors for an art show. In a newly renovated studio, dance students gripped barres and posed on pointe in ballet shoes.

About 300 eighth-graders recently applied for 100 conservatory spots next school year, Orr said. He wants the school to help strengthen arts programs at the elementary and middle campuses that feed into it.

“We want to make sure kids in the Central cluster don’t miss the opportunity gap to experience what’s right here in their hometown,” Orr said. “We don’t want this to be just for kids who’ve had private lessons since they were little.”

Credit: Ben Gray

Credit: Ben Gray