The Schools The schools we work with are selected based on need: we reach out to schools with a combination of low reading scores, low graduation rates and evident lack of theater programming. All of our programs are offered at no cost to our schools. Walton High School AT A GLANCE 4-year graduation rate: 38.2% Walton High School has struggled with overcrowding and disorder for years. In order to enter the school each day, students must pass through security guards, metal detectors, and wands. But in spite of the odds at a school where only 38% of students graduate in 4 years, Walton's students have proven to be some of our most powerful actors. These students don't hold back when it comes to bringing drama to the stage, improvising scenes around family, pregnancy and violence with sensitivity and humor, as can be seen in the five one acts they wrote during the 2002-2003 school year. Their amazing skill at comedy was also spotlighted in their original production last spring, In My Dreams I Am . For this piece, students called on poetry, improv, dance, rhythm, and mask making to create a truly moving performance. 2004-2005 Teaching Artists: Suzy Myers and Toby Lawless Clara Barton High School AT A GLANCE 4 year graduation rate: 72.3% Clara Barton High School, where we piloted our program in 2000-2001, is an educational option school, which means all the students applied in order to be admitted. Its over 2000 students (85% of them young women) are all enrolled in academic programs that are geared toward the health professions. They are a vibrant, bright, and artistically expressive crowd. Before Opening Act began in October 2000, there were no acting or theater programs in the school. Today we have a strong core of thirty students who have produced four afternoons of monologues and improvisations and four full length plays (written and acted by the students), which were performed at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Chashama, and the Gene Frankel Theatre. Two years ago the Clara Barton students outdid themselves in performing a modern adaptation of Shakespeare's Othello, to be topped only by last year's original production, Creation Myths, collaboratively written by the students themselves. 2004-2005 Teaching Artists: Dani Snyder and Heather Acs Automotive Career and Technical Education High School AT A GLANCE 4-year gGraduation rate: 40.2% Automotive High School is a vocational-technical school where students need to apply to attend. A trade school where the curriculum centers around everything cars, Automotive has previously suffered a bad reputation for violence and heavy handed security, but has recently begun initiatives to turn the school around. The school was taken off the “failing schools” list in 2004. Though a "technical" school, Automotive has no shortage of artistic talent - in fact, their (mostly male) students have amazed us with their brilliant instinct for improvisation and comedy as well as their courage to address powerful dramatic situations. 2004-2005 Teaching Artists: Julia Kamin and Toby Lawless Lafayette High School AT A GLANCE 4-year graduation rate: 43.1% Lafayette High School is our newest partnering school. It is a neighborhood school in which students may also apply to Lafayette's health professions program, where students volunteer weekly at a local nursing home. Despite Lafayette 's history of racial incidents and poor attendance, we have found Lafayette to be a welcoming school whose teachers are committed to bringing programs like Opening Act to their students. 2004-2005 Teaching Artists: Julia Kamin and Megan Cramer
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