How a new arts-focused South Dallas school is earning its ‘Baby Booker T.’ nickname

Posters and playbills featuring Broadway musicals line the walls of Ramad Carter’s theater classroom at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Arts Academy in South Dallas. Last year his fourth- through eighth-grade students performed “Sister Act”; this year they’re prepping for “Annie.”

“I didn’t see my first Broadway show until I was in my 20s,” Carter says. “A lot of them have seen three or four, and they’re 11 and 12 years old.”

Accessibility, Carter says, is a “huge factor.”

“The idea of theater was meant to fit a certain class of people. Specifically in this area,” he says of both South Dallas and the MLK arts academy, “a lot of them don’t even know what theater is, and it’s a far-fetched idea that they can be a part of it.

“We introduce them to it and let them know they can be a part of it.”

It was August 2020 when the Martin Luther King Jr. Learning Center reopened as the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Arts Academy for pre-kindergarten through fifth-graders. Then-superintendent Michael Hinojosa nicknamed it “Baby Booker T.” — a nod to Dallas ISD’s nationally renowned Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, with its reputation for propelling students into careers in the arts.

Booker T. is a magnet school, and the intent of its admission policies is to equitably draw students from neighborhoods across Dallas, providing space for the district’s most talented dancers, musicians, visual artists and theater performers to flourish. But in 2020, less than 1% of Booker T.’s student population came from South Dallas. One of the explicit goals of opening an arts-focused school in the neighborhood was to reverse this trend.

Four years later, as the inaugural fifth-graders of MLK arts academy prepared to exit the school as eighth-graders, four of them applied to Booker T. — and all four of them made the cut.

That’s a huge success, and it’s being celebrated beyond the campus by partners whose investments were crucial in making it happen.

It took teachers like Carter, who are creating classroom environments they wish they had as youth. It took a community partner like Forest Forward, which strips away barriers to students’ arts enrichment opportunities. And it took an arts community partner like the AT&T Performing Arts Center, who developed a private coaching program for students without the resources and know-how to audition for a school like Booker T.

Their collective work is clearing a path from South Dallas to the Dallas Arts District, but roadblocks remain. The MLK arts academy opened in August with four arts teachers — two fewer than last year. One no longer there is the visual arts teacher and Booker T. alumna who saw three of her students graduate to her alma mater this fall.

How this will impact MLK students’ prospects is unclear. More investments are on the horizon in the form of facilities. A $38 million Dallas ISD bond project will expand the campus to create new arts spaces, and a $75 million fundraising campaign for the historic Forest Theater includes cutting-edge educational spaces, kitty-corner to the MLK campus.

The school’s veteran principal hopes it will create room enough to double the number of arts teachers who can unlock students’ potential.

The problem: Talented South Dallas students didn’t apply to Booker T. 

Few students from South Dallas attended Booker T. in the last decade or so. The year before MLK reopened as an arts academy, only two freshmen from South Dallas’ Madison and Lincoln high schools had successfully auditioned to attend Booker T., according to Dallas ISD data, and neither had come from the neighborhood middle school, Billy Earl Dade, or even from Dallas schools. One had attended middle school in Red Oak ISD, and one had attended an International Leadership of Texas charter school, all of which are located in the suburbs. 

More than 40 freshmen admitted to the arts magnet high school for the 2019-20 school year — nearly one-fifth of the class — had attended suburban middle schools yet turned in Dallas utility bills as proof of their in-district residency. It called into question the increased measures the district had put into place to make sure outsiders weren’t circumventing board policy, following an exposé that spring.

The data didn’t just show that suburban students were finding loopholes; it also showed vast disparities within the district. Admission policies to Dallas ISD magnet schools are set up to give equal access to students across the district, by setting aside a certain number of spots for students zoned to each high school. But the numbers show that families from mostly white, resourced neighborhoods have a sizable advantage over Black and Latino families from historically redlined neighborhoods.  

Families in zip code 75214, the Lakewood neighborhood, sent 91 students to Booker T. for the 2018-19 school year, while South Dallas zip codes 75210 and 75212 sent 16. 

“It wasn’t because of a lack of talent — it was a lack of resources,” says Ashley Wilson, the executive vice-president of Forest Forward.

Forest Forward: ‘No stone is unturned when it comes to barriers’

The nonprofit shepherding the restoration and expansion of the historic Forest Theater in South Dallas is determined to make sure that students of color don’t continue to be shut out by historic inequities. The school and the theater sit within walking distance, a block and a half away from each other, and while Forest Forward’s $75 million fundraising campaign includes a future “education hub” with a recording studio, a 360-degree immersion room and a performance hall, all prioritizing MLK students, no one is sitting around waiting for it to be built.

Like South Dallas, the MLK arts academy is two-thirds Black and one-third Hispanic. Part of Forest Forward’s commitment to DISD is to ensure that MLK remains a neighborhood school with a population of at least 75% South Dallas students, even though it is open to students across the district.

“We’re on the frontlines, partnered with the school’s parent liaison, at recruiting fairs speaking right alongside her, talking about what curriculum looks like and what an arts education will bring,” Wilson says. 

Forest Forward hosts free summer camps at Fair Park’s Broadway Dallas and the African American Museum, exclusive to MLK arts academy students. The students meet Broadway actors backstage and take professional headshots. Booker T.’s theater director acted as stage manager this past summer, along with a professional choreographer and two directors who coached the students to perform a full musical at the end of camp.

“And we feed them good,” says LaSheryl Walker, Forest Forward’s director of partnerships & community engagement. “Literally, on one of the surveys, a parent wrote, ‘My kid loved the food.’ ”