New arts high school is a hard-fought victory

The old Kensington High School had a high dropout rate. The small high schools created through its overhaul continue to inspire hope.

by Dale Mezzacappa

Photo: Harvey Finkle

Malik Mitchum does an acrobatic move during dance class at Kensington CAPA. Dance is just one of the arts programs offered. Students can also take theatre, music, and cinematography.

"Five-six-seven-eight!"

The students in Victor Colon's dance class at Kensington High School for Creative and Performing Arts suddenly came to life. Arranged in facing pairs, they started swiveling their hips and sashaying in unison – one-two-three-tap, one-two-three-tap.

It was bachata, a Cuban-inflected dance that originated in the Dominican Republic.

Students – some gliding like pros, others stiffly stuttering a half-step behind – stole looks at themselves in the mirrored wall of the top-of-the-line dance studio. Then they stopped.

"OK," said Colon, a burly professional dancer with a shaved head. "Again."

Along with the others, Malik Mitchum lined up for another go.

Mitchum likes dancing, and he's pretty good at it. But that's not why he came to KCAPA. In fact, he didn't want to go there at all, aspiring instead to attend one of the city's top magnets.

Now, however, the 16-year-old junior is glad that fate and circumstance landed him there, even though it is a non-selective neighborhood school in one of the city's most depressed areas.

"This school is excellent," Mitchum said. "A lot of the teachers, they've had my back. And kids here have goals. I want to do pre-med and become a pediatrician."

In the past, getting to medical school from Kensington High was highly improbable. It's a tad less improbable now, largely the result of a prolonged community campaign to break up the old Kensington High into four smaller, themed schools.

"We're invested in the kids," said Kensington native Debora Carrera, KCAPA's 39-year-old principal. "We have relationships with the families. I see fewer kids dropping out."

The actual statistics show some hard-won progress. And KCAPA has the vibe of a school where good things are happening.

On recent visits, the school was calm and hallways seemed trouble-free.

Besides dance, students do art, theater, music, and cinematography. There is a professional-quality broadcast studio. Students make films.

Carrera bragged that one student made an impressive documentary about his mother; two others made an "awesome, hysterical" short feature about a little sister's love affair with her teddy bear.

"Themed schools have ways of engaging young people in education and making schools places where they want to be," said Andi Perez, executive director of Youth United for Change, the group that spearheaded the small-schools campaign.

For decades, the old Kensington High has had one of the highest dropout rates in the city. This wasn't so destructive to students' futures when factory jobs were plentiful.

But the factories left, the drug trade flourished, and ethnic tensions escalated, leaving Kensington particularly impervious to efforts to ratchet up school effectiveness.

A decade ago students and community leaders took hold of the problem, deciding that small, themed high schools provided the most promising path to engage and graduate more students. Activists, including students, did research, visited model schools in other cities, and relentlessly lobbied school officials.

At a time when small schools were favored by then-CEO Paul Vallas, the campaign had an effect. The District started the process of breaking up Kensington High into four smaller schools in 2004, with themes largely chosen by students and the community: CAPA, Culinary, International Business and Finance, and Urban Education.

It wasn't ideal: Unlike some other new, small schools, these didn't get a year to plan. KCAPA spent its first three years sharing the old building with Finance. The breakup was rather crude, with a wall built down the middle of the school. Culinary is housed in what had been an annex.

Advocates fought hard for a new building for KCAPA. When it finally opened in 2010, it was a showplace.