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.’ ”

“I have driven kids home. We have picked them up in the morning to go to camp,” Wilson says. “We make sure no stone is unturned when it comes to barriers.”

This goes for the school year, too. Forest Forward administers a fund for MLK families that covers their utility bills, medical assistance, rent shortages — “pretty much any financial emergency need a parent has,” Wilson says. They spend more than $25,000 a semester so that students’ basic needs are covered.

“Let’s get this right — who cares if they’re on the stage if they don’t have food?” Wilson asks.

AT&T Performing Arts Center: A $600 investment to level the playing field

Students who don’t know where their next meal might come from or whether their water will be shut off don’t have the money for art supplies or vocal lessons, and educators say that’s key to competing for a spot at Booker T.

“You have students from Frisco and Plano whose parents can spend hundreds of dollars,” Wilson says. “After school one-on-one coaching with a teaching artist for music or theater — that hadn’t happened before.”

It did happen for MLK Arts Academy students last year, thanks to a partnership with the AT&T Performing Arts Center. The center’s education staff had partnered with Jesús Moroles Expressive Arts Vanguard (formerly Sidney Lanier) in West Dallas for years, providing community concerts, field trips and visiting artists through a program called ArtsBridge-Powered by Toyota.

Then Covid brought everything to a halt.

During the lockdown, Autumn Garrison, the arts center’s director of education and community engagement, called former Dallas ISD theater and dance director Rachel Harrah and asked, “What can we do that’s more impactful? What are the needs we might not be aware of?” 

Harrah told her that the missing link between the students’ raw talent and their ability to make their way into spaces like the arts magnet high school is access to that one-on-one training.

“One thing we learned in the first couple of years is a lot of the kids don’t know what Booker T. is,” Garrison says. 

“Or even the parents,” echoes Ahila Gulasekaram, the arts center’s education and community engagement manager.

They launched the first round of private coaching sessions in the 2020-21 school year with six Jesús Moroles students. The arts center identifies and pays teaching artists directly, and “we try to find teachers who are also Booker T. alumni,” Garrison says. “They’ve been there, gone through the process and know what it’s like.”

The artists have expertise in Booker T.’s four conservatories — theater, dance, music and visual arts — and spend six one-on-one sessions with each student to “get them prepped and ready to go with more confidence, and honing in on whatever discipline they’re working toward for their profession,” Garrison says. 

The new ArtsBridge South Dallas program expanded the private coaching to MLK last year. Three of the four MLK students now at Booker T. were coached by Kristen Rice, a former Dallas ISD teacher who now runs the nonprofit Color Me Empowered.

One of the first things Rice did was let Garrison and Gulasekaram know her visual artists didn’t have access to the supplies they needed to create a portfolio for their Booker T. application. The center responded by adding free art kits to the coaching program.

Private coaching costs the arts center roughly $600 per student, Garrison says. Thirty seventh- and eighth-graders from Moroles and MLK participated last year, and 21 of the 22 who applied to Booker T. got in.

“That’s $600 that can literally change the trajectory of a child’s life — the way they see themselves and the spaces they belong in,” Rice says. “Over and over I had to tell those kids — you belong at Booker T. This is a space for you.”

And the students who claim these spaces often start in arts classrooms.

MLK arts academy: Teachers who draw out students’ confidence and talent

Pérez Prado’s “Mambo No. 5” echoes through David Arevalo’s dance studio, as his bilingual fifth-graders perform a choreographed routine. It’s the same song Arevalo danced to with Superintendent Stephanie Elizalde at the 2023 HeART of Teaching gala.

Arevalo started teaching these fifth-graders when they were first-graders, the year MLK became an arts academy. He’s from South Texas and attended his hometown arts high school. Though he was admitted as a violinist, he switched over to dance, even though he’d never taken classes because his parents considered it a “girl thing.”

“My parents couldn’t object because it was free,” Arevalo says.

In his initial years at MLK, he dealt with pushback from students and parents, especially of the boys. At first they are quiet and still, but he watches as their spatial awareness and confidence blooms. 

“Now everybody wants to perform,” he says. “They all want to see the shows.” 

Arevalo teaches them a range of styles, including ballet folklorico, Texas drill team high-kicks and HBCU stepping. The arts program aims to “get them ready to go to any high school they want to go to,” he says.

He’s observed Booker T. dancers and seen some already advanced in their training but others with no dance experience — “which would have been me,” Arevalo says. What the inexperienced dancers lack in polish they make up for in stage presence, he says, and that’s something he knows he can teach his MLK students.

“If they have the will, I can help them get there for sure,” Arevalo says, adding that “connections matter” because “dance teachers in the district know how I train.” But there are only a handful of dance teachers in Dallas ISD like Arevalo, who teach at the elementary and middle school levels, and he’s the only one in South Dallas.

“This is unheard of,” he says of his position, “and it’s unfortunate every time there’s a budget cut because we’re the first ones to go — us and art.” 

The challenge: Fewer arts instructors, even at an arts-centric school

Principal Romikianta Sneed is in her sixth year of leading MLK. She saw it through the transition from a failing campus, according to Texas Education Agency standards, to an academy that “offers the arts to the community in Sunny South Dallas,” Sneed says.

When asked why MLK eliminated its music and visual arts positions, Sneed says she has to “be strategic” about conservatory positions, which often means these teachers have “double duty.”

MLK is “looking for a visual arts teacher right now” who can put to good use the school’s new $75,000 kiln and “not just work with middle schoolers getting into Booker T. but work with pre-K scholars,” Sneed says. And “even though we lost a [music] teacher, we did not lose an offering,” she says, explaining that her piano teacher, Lorenzo Wheeler, is also teaching general music and choir this year. 

Sneed says she currently has five conservatory instructors, including the physical education teacher. In addition to dance, theater and piano, the school has an audio visual teacher, whose focus is film and digital arts.

Her ultimate goal is to grow to eight or nine conservatory teachers. Along with the kiln, a bond construction project is adding a new dance studio, piano lab, maker space, black box theater, and band and choir classrooms to the campus. In 2026 when construction is complete, Sneed says her dream is to fill those new classrooms “with as many [full-time employees] in a conservatory as humanly possible.”

But to hire those teachers, Sneed says, “we need the space.” 

The opportunity: An arts school open to anyone — no audition required

The current construction means what the building looks like from the outside is vastly different from what’s happening on the inside, Sneed says. People driving by the school who just moved to South Dallas will tell her, “I thought you guys weren’t even open!” 

Not only is it open, Sneed says, but it’s open to anyone — “there is no requirement to get into MLK arts academy,” she says. “We’re not a magnet school; we are a school of choice, which means you apply, and if we have a seat, you get in.” 

Welcoming any and all students means that “I had students who didn’t speak at all in the beginning,” says Carter, MLK’s theater teacher, “and they are leaving asking me if they can be in plays and audition.”

Sending one of his eighth-graders to Booker T. this fall was “a beautiful moment,” Carter says.

“I know the world is a place that can really beat you down and make you feel like you can’t accomplish certain things,” he says, adding that no matter where his students go from MLK, his goal is for them to “leave with confidence.”