AURORA | A proposed charter school in Aurora aims to take on racism with a performance arts-based curriculum primarily for black and Hispanic students.
The proposed Visions Performing Arts College Prep school in the Aurora Public Schools district would include novel programs such as learning math through dance choreography, offer comedy majors and focus on candid discussions of racism.
Arts education nonprofit Visions Performing Arts Company hopes to convert into a charter school if approve by the APS Board of Education in June.
The school would open its doors August 2020 and eventually enroll more than 700 sixth-through-12th grade students.
Visions Performing Arts Company works in Aurora and Denver public schools to provide arts workshops for dance, theater and spoken word poetry.
Auset Maryam Ali, the group’s founder, would become the school’s executive director. She’s a a playwright, a former dancer who has performed alongside rapper Jay-Z and a spiritual healer who assesses clients’ metaphysical energy and spiritual well-being.
Ali is also deeply involved in Aurora’s arts scene, having served on the City of Aurora Cultural Affairs Commission and managed her nonprofit for about 15 years.
She said she was hearing from community members for years that she should open a school and decided to make the leap from a nonprofit to a school.
A motivating factor for the school was what she sees is a lack of performing arts opportunities for low-income kids and students of color, citing tough competition for limited slots at schools like the Denver School of the Arts. An A Plus Colorado report three years ago found that low-income students in neighboring DPS were less likely to receive quality arts instruction compared to wealthier students.
Aurora state Sen. Rhonda Fields has worked with Ali for years, and she said low-income kids and students of color can miss out for competitive arts programs.
“Some of these kids would not have access to these programs just because of their zip code,” she said of Aurora students.
To address the need, Ali has proposed a comprehensive curriculum by bringing in support from local charter school mavens and a Harvard-educated consultant.
The curriculum balances an emphasis on performing arts instruction with a popular idea touted by writer Malcolm Gladwell that anything can be perfected with 10,000 hours of practice.
Students will have standard core curriculum instruction in science, math and English language arts subjects and others, but also spearhead performance arts projects, such as learning and performing technical styles of poetry, stand-up comedy, cosmetology and choreographed dance.
Those enrolled will also take financial literacy classes to learn about filing taxes and starting small businesses of their own.
The stated goal of the school is to provide a home where mostly black and Hispanic students can learn free of subtle racist tilts, which Ali said are common in schools that can negatively impact students’ potentials.
A guiding value of the school is frank conversation about systemic racism, according to the school’s charter school application. Instruction will “validate what students ‘feel intrinsically’ about oppression and lack of quality access to opportunity,” the application says.
The students will “take ownership by proving the system wrong and proving that they can succeed,” Ali said, “without compromising their identities.”
The crux of the scheme is filling a school with predominantly black and Hispanic students, which is illegal under state and federal law. The charter application defines the target student population as 30 percent black, 30 percent hispanic, 15 percent Asian-American, and 10 percent white along with Pacific Islander and Native American students.
But Ali said the demographic is shaping up naturally in about 40 letters of intent forms collected by the school. She added that white families are interested as well because they are also concerned about racial segregation in education, which she says is stark in the Denver metro.
The school will also employ a lottery system that legally allows the school to prioritize low-income students, English learners and students that are neglected or homeless – as well as residents of largely black and Hispanic neighborhoods in north Aurora.
The school plans to employ mostly black and Hispanic teachers but not discriminate on the basis of race. Ali also said that the staffing search, which is ongoing, will likely yield those results simply by the types of applicants the school considers.