The School for Creative and Performing Arts (SCPA) is a magnet arts school in Cincinnati in the US state of Ohio, and part of the Cincinnati Public Schools (CPS). SCPA was founded in 1973. Of the approximately 350 arts schools in the United States, SCPA is one of the oldest and has been cited as a model for both racial integration and for arts programs in over 100 cities.
SCPA had three different homes in its first four years, including a makeshift campus in the Mount Adams neighborhood and another in Roselawn. In 1976, it occupied the Old Woodward High School building, on the site of one of the oldest public schools in the country. In 2009–10, the school was featured in the MTV reality series Taking the Stage, filmed at the school and featuring SCPA students. A new facility in Over-the-Rhine was championed by the late Cincinnati Pops Maestro Erich Kunzel.
History
Background
The School for Creative and Performing Arts arose, in part, as a response to the recurring desegregation battles in the Cincinnati Public Schools (CPS) in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In a 1965 civil rights suit, the city prevailed when a federal judge found that the schools were not intentionally segregated, but that "the racial composition of each school is simply a result of the racial composition of the neighborhoods which they serve". By 1971, Cincinnati's neighborhoods and schools had grown more segregated and the Supreme Court of the United States upheld forced busing as a remedy for school segregation in other cities. Desiring to avoid such drastic remedies for Cincinnati, newly appointed Superintendent Dr. Donald Waldrip pushed forward a program of alternative schools (later called magnet schools), designed "to calm the desires of parents for academic choice and to stem the demands of federal judges for court-ordered desegregation." The theory behind alternative schools was open enrollment: students could attend any alternative school they chose at no cost, so long as an even racial balance at the new school was maintained. So far as possible, students were admitted to these programs on a one white for one black basis. The School for Creative and Performing Arts was the first alternative school in what would become one of the largest and most robust magnet programs in the country.
In 1965, Robert McSpadden and Bill Dickinson, both music teachers in the Cincinnati Public Schools, founded the Cincinnati All-City Boy Choir, where they were struck by how the discipline they established for the boys in the choir carried over into their academic studies. They conceived the idea of a school where basic education was combined with intensive attention to children with artistic talents. With the support of Waldrip and Tom Murray, director for the west-central division of Cincinnati elementary schools, they pushed for $119,000 (~$ in ) as part of a tax levy referendum in May 1973; the measure was defeated. The school was approved with a drastically reduced budget of $27,000 plus $9,850 from the Board of Education's general fund. They turned to private funding and won a $292,000 grant from J. Ralph Corbett, one of the city's foremost philanthropists for the arts, and $24,500 for a piano lab from the Baldwin Piano Company, which had manufactured pianos in Cincinnati since 1891. The School for Creative and Performing Arts opened in August 1973, as the only grade four through six school for the performing arts in the country and the first public school that combined all of the arts in a single program. The curriculum included art, instrumental music, choral music, dance and drama, and was not organized strictly by grade, but permitted students to advance as soon as their abilities allowed. Murray explained: Fourth through sixth grades will be together in classes. Teaching will often be done in teams. Art students will design scenery for plays, written by drama students. Music pupils will supply the music. They work together regardless of age. In reading classes they will read according to their own individual levels. A brilliant music student, capable of interpreting Beethoven's wildest dreams, might stumble on fifth level reading. This does not make him a dunce simply a slow reader.
Founding in Mount Adams (1973–1975) Dickinson was named coordinator and six weeks later he, McSpadden, Murray and others had selected a staff, developed a program, recruited students, and moved into the Mount Adams Public School building at 1125 St. Gregory Street. Described by Cincinnati Magazine as "a quaint village of imaginative, arty residents, unusual shops and restaurants, and historic buildings" and overlooking downtown Cincinnati and the Ohio River, Mount Adams had been home to the Art Academy of Cincinnati (the museum school of the Cincinnati Art Museum) since 1887, and was a "mecca for students and teachers of art". The Mount Adams School was nearly defunct, with fewer than 80 students remaining. Fifty of those children, ranging from kindergarten (around age five) to third grade (around age eight) remained alongside the new SCPA. A dozen of the Mount Adams middle school students were accepted into the new program, along with the 140 other fourth through sixth grade pupils selected from schools around the city by audition.
By 1974, SCPA had 332 students, with 500 on the waiting list, and had overflowed into rented space in the surrounding neighborhood, including three rooms at the nearby Holy Cross School, two rooms at the community center two blocks away, and large room for drama above Mike's Meat Market across the street. Students practiced instruments in hallways and restrooms, and the library was in the middle of the second floor hall. Student productions were held in other schools around the city, and the first major musical, Babes in Toyland, was performed at Education Center downtown. With plans to expand to ninth grade (around age 14) and 540 students in 1975, and to twelfth grade (around age 17) and 1,400 students in 1977, a new facility had to be found. Waldrip proposed the school move to the Old Woodward school building, then home of Abigail Cutter Junior High School, in Over-the-Rhine, a predominantly African-American area near downtown. Neighborhood resistance was strong and opponents, arguing that "the school administration was trying to avoid problems of integration by moving an alternative school to Cutter and transferring Cutter students elsewhere", blocked the plan.
Councilwoman Bobbie Stern proposed the school move to Cincinnati Union Terminal, a National Historic Landmark which the Historic American Buildings Survey called "a unique and monumental manifestation of Art Deco architecture and interior decoration", noted for its mosaic murals depicting the history of Cincinnati and its rotunda, high and long, the largest semi-dome in the western hemisphere. The facility, vacant since it was abandoned by Amtrak in 1972, was to house the school, a maintenance facility for the Queen City Metro transit service, and a new rail terminal for Amtrak. The plan was approved in April 1975 and was due for completion for the 1976 school year.
Transition in Roselawn (1975–1976) Temporary space was needed in the interim, and the school relocated its 550 fourth through ninth grade students to rented space in Roselawn, the epicenter of Cincinnati's Jewish Community. The school was divided between two buildings, the Yavneh Day School building at 1636 Summit Road and the nearby Jewish Community Center. The Yavneh Day school, founded in 1952 by parents who wanted to combine secular and Jewish education for their children, moved to Roselawn in 1958 but had outgrown that facility. The school had no lockers; students carried their belongings between buildings. Lunches were delivered from another school and served at a nearby church.
Dickinson became principal in 1975, and worked to fully integrate the arts into the academic program. "Academics don't end when art, drama or music classes begin," he said, "but blend, in an interdisciplinary approach to education." Music study included acoustics and the history and architecture of important musical periods; art history was part of the art curriculum and anatomy and physiology were studied in the dance program. The school was recognized with The Cincinnati Post's Corbett Award in 1976 as "the arts organization making an outstanding contribution to the community".
The Union Terminal project was derailed when the three prospective tenants failed to agree on how to share the space. Having outgrown its temporary facilities, SCPA was again forced to find a new home for the following year. After examining options including the historic Rockdale Temple and two schools slated to be closed in the city's West End, the school board once again settled on the Old Woodward building, over the objections of the community.
Old Woodward and national attention (1976–1990)
SCPA's new home was in the heart of Pendleton district in Over-the-Rhine. One of the largest German-American neighborhoods in the United States in the 19th century and a famed entertainment district at that time, Over-the-Rhine had declined into an impoverished and crime-ridden enclave for migrant Appalachians in the 20th century. By 1970, a combination of white flight and the destruction of surrounding slums had transformed the area into Cincinnati's most infamous ghetto. It is one of the largest, most intact urban historic districts in the United States and the most dangerous neighborhood in Cincinnati. The school, with its 650 students, moved into this historic but blighted neighborhood, and its Old Woodward School building at 1310 Sycamore Street.
Woodward was one of the oldest public schools in the country, founded as the Woodward Free Grammar School in 1831; it was named for William Woodward, a local tanner who donated the land to provide, in his words, "facilities to educate the children of persons who could not afford the expense of private schooling". The building was replaced once in 1855, and again in 1907 when President William Howard Taft, who graduated from Woodward in 1874, laid the cornerstone of the current building; it opened in 1910. The site is linked to the Underground Railroad, an informal network of secret routes and safe houses used by 19th-century black slaves in the United States; Levi Coffin (known as "The President of the Underground Railroad") had a home there from 1856 to 1863. The five-story brick, stone, and terra cotta building is approximately . Designed by Gustav Brach, it was considered "an architectural gem" in its time, with some of the most modern facilities of its day, including flush toilets, central heating, and two swimming pools. It is graced with 12 rare Rookwood Pottery drinking fountains from the early 1900s, gifts of the Art League, founded in 1895, which raised dues from students who would then vote on works of art to buy for the school. The building is part of the Over-the-Rhine National Register Historic District, which encompasses of the original German community and adjoins the Sycamore – 13th Street Historic District, which reflects the significant architecture associated with middle and late 19th century Greek Revival, Queen Anne, and Italianate styles.
Woodward High School moved to a new facility in Bond Hill in 1953, and the building became Abigail Cutter Junior High School (also known as Cutter), named for William Woodward's wife. SCPA occupied the fourth floor in 1976, and the entire building in 1977, displacing the Cutter students to other public schools. It graduated its first class in 1979, becoming the first elementary through grade twelve arts program in the country. The first so-called "survivors", who began in fourth grade, graduated in 1982.