Judy Sirota Rosenthal Photos
A girl is angry about feeling socially left out and is talking about it with a more popular friend who, she suspects, sympathizes more than she lets on. “Isn’t it weird being weird? Maybe we could be weird together. Wait, that came out weird,” the girl says.
A boy is annoyed at having to take more responsibility than his younger brother. He feels like he’s being too much to do, forced to grow up a little too fast. “If you told me this was the price of middle school, I would have stayed in the fourth grade,” the boy says.
A girl wants to go to a friend’s Christmas party and knows she isn’t being invited because the friend is embarrassed by the girl’s poverty. She’s not letting her friend off the hook. “Why can’t I come?” the girl asks, an edge in her voice.
These were among the monologues used in a workshop on Sunday to suggest how teaching will work at the Academic Theatre Lab on Audubon Street — ATLAS for short — a new independent all-day middle school opening at Neighborhood Music School in the fall of 2019 with its first cohort of 7th graders.
The school will begin taking applications for admission Aug. 1. But first, it held workshops on Sunday and the weekend before to give a sense of what it would mean to structure an entire middle school curriculum around the concept of a theater lab, in which each grade of about 20 students will become a theater company putting on four productions a year while also learning the literature, social studies, math, and science they need to be ready for high school.
NMS Executive Director Dan Gurvich and Director of Programs Noah Bloom had been talking about the possibility of opening a middle school at NMS since 2015, according to Gurvich. Surveying New Haven’s educational landscape, they felt that the arts offerings were abundant at the elementary and high school levels, but there were fewer opportunities for middle-school students. There was a gap to be filled. It was “something to aspire to on a three-to-10-year time frame,” Gurvich said.
Giarrizzo-Bartz.
Until educator Maria Giarrizzo-Bartz overheard Bloom talking about their plan. It turned out she and fellow educator Caroline Golschneider had developed just that kind of idea while they were classmates getting their masters degrees as Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. She and Golschneider had both settled in the New Haven area; Golschneider, who grew up in Wallingford, had done student teaching at Wilbur Cross. Giarrizzo-Bartz told Bloom about their idea on the spot.
“I remember the words flying out of my mouth,” Giarrizzo-Bartz said. She had taught theater to middle-school students in East Harlem and noticed that “kids were motivated to do work that they would otherwise not do.” She originally thought that she would one day start a children’s theater company. But in thinking more about how to apply the theater to a classroom, she realized that “I actually needed to open a school,” she said.
Golschneider shared her vision. She and Golschneider were both students in Harvard’s education program. Both had husbands in New Haven. In the two-hour rides between New Haven and Boston, they fleshed out their ideas. Mentored by educator Linda Nathan, they knew how to turn those ideas into a full-fledged proposal for a new school.
The curriculum they developed takes advantage of the way “theater integrates other art forms,” Giarrizzo-Bartz said. Theater’s connections to literature, history, and politics were clear. The technical aspects of putting on a production would lend themselves to applied math and engineering. And students putting on a play would be “working on an authentic project,” Golschneider said. “There’s built-in accountability,” Giarrizzo agreed.
To round out the students’ education, Atlas’s curriculum would also include more traditional classes in math and science — with the concepts readily applied to the theater lab.
“The more we learned about it,” said Gurvich, “the more we thought this could work.”
NMS, after all, already had the building needed to house a school. “On weekends,” Gurvich said, “this place is bursting at the seams,” but during school hours “it’s underutilized.” And his staff could handle the administrative aspects of running a school. When Atlas has both seventh and eighth grades filled, totaling just over 40 students at about 20 per grade, it will add about $1 million to NMS’s current annual $4.3 million operating budget. Tuition at Atlas will be $25,000, but NMS is already starting a robust fundraising effort to provide financial aid — “the easiest fundraising effort we’ve done,” Gurvich said. “When you speak about this to parents or prospective donors, their eyes just light up, so you know you’re doing the right thing.”
“We’re realizing that we have change the model at Neighborhood Music School,” Gurvich added. “It needs to be more comprehensive, sustained experiences.” NMS was already heading in that direction anyway with its after-school music and leadership programs. Giarrizzo-Bartz’s and Golschneider’s ideas for a school were a good fit. It wasn’t just about providing music instruction; “this is about helping people lead happier and healthier lives.”
Giarrizzo-Bartz recalled how theater had helped her through the notoriously difficult middle school years. “I had been very successful in school,” she said, “but it was in theater that I learned the things that helped me in life.”
Golschneider.
“Theater encompasses everything you need to be a human,” Golschneider said. “Community comes together quickly and easily because you’re working toward a common goal” of putting on a play.
They are in the process of hiring a STEM educator to round out the teaching staff of three for Atlas’s first year. In 2020, with two grades to cover, the staff is planned to grow to five, with supplemental teaching artists. Each of the five teachers will take on some administrative duties; no need for a dedicated principal, for example. “Teachers will be leaders and leaders will be teachers,” Giarrizzo-Bartz said.
All of Giarrizzo-Bartz’s and Golschneider’s ideas were on display in Sunday’s workshop, as they and the students worked through a series of activities designed to get their brains and bodies moving. Prospective students and their parents — 20 people in all — talked about why they were there and what their expectations were for what Atlas could offer.
“I recognized her creativity,” one parent said of her daughter, “and wanted to find a place where she could evolve that.”
“I’m looking for a community where my boys can be creative and not be judged for it,” said another parent.
“I’m here because I need a school to go to,” one of those boys said.
After going over the school’s general principles and what the day’s schedule would be like, Giarrizzo-Bartz and Golschneider had the parents leave. Then there were performances and textual analysis of monologues, an analysis of a certain president’s political speech while on the campaign trail focusing on his motivations for his words, and at last, an exercise in building a piece of scenery out of PVC pipes and bolts of cloth. The participants, shy at first, had formed bonds by the workshop’s end, talking out the challenges they were facing in the workshop and bouncing ideas off one another. At the end of the workshop, they and their obviously pleased parents reflected on what they liked best about the afternoon spent getting to know what an Atlas education might look like.
“They were engaged,” one parent said. “They didn’t look up when we came in.”
One student remarked on how problems in building a piece of scenery affected them. “When our thing fell apart, that strengthened our team. We became better thinkers.”
Atlas will open its doors at Neighborhood Music School on Audubon Street in the fall of 2019. Applicants for its first class of seventh graders will be considered for admission Aug. 1 to Jan. 15. Click here for more information.
