They really are different.
They would be the first ones to admit it, these high school kids who get up each weekday morning and climb not onto a school bus but onto a commuter train to follow their dreams. Their destination: an old brick, two-story building on the Near North Side of Chicago.
If you ask any of the 143 students from throughout the Chicago area who gather each day at the Chicago Academy for the Arts why they make the long trek and then spend up to 10 hours a day toiling at the school, they’ll talk about dedication. They’ll mention a driving passion. They’ll say they feel they really belong there.
“I’ve been singing in choirs since I was a little girl. I’ve wanted to sing for as long as I can remember,” said Sara Arnold, 16, a junior music major from Elgin. “If I hadn’t come to this school, I don’t think I’d be as prepared for college or a music career. I wouldn’t know as much about music auditions. I’ve learned an unbelievable amount here.”
Jessica Oliver, 17, a junior music major from Buffalo Grove who transferred to the academy last fall, credits the academy with turning her life around.
“In the five months I’ve been here, I’ve learned more than all the other years,” Oliver said. “It has been a complete 180-degree turnaround for me. If I hadn’t come here, I probably would have dropped out of school. I couldn’t handle it anymore. I had so many problems. I didn’t feel like I was accepted by my teachers or the students.”
Oliver said that when she was attending her former school, she was so depressed she couldn’t make herself get up and head out the door to school. Now she’s eager to get to class.
“The school has given me so much, a better sense of where I am,” Oliver said. “I’m very gung-ho now on academics. This semester I got all A’s and one B. I’m planning to go to college and grad school.”
Marcus Marinelli, 16, a sophomore music major from Schaumburg, said that even though he is not headed for a career in the arts like Arnold and Oliver, the academy has given him a more diverse knowledge of all forms of music and the opportunity to meet a lot of different kids.
“It’s a lot of fun, but it’s not just jamming with a bunch of kids,” Marinelli said. “The (academic) classes are normal classes. They aren’t easy, but there are fewer kids in each class. It’s a great school, but it’s for serious people who are dedicated to their art forms.”
The parents of these “serious” students pay a high price for nurturing their children’s uniqueness. The academy’s tuition runs $8,815 a year, but headmaster Frank Mustari said that at least 50 percent of the students get some kind of financial assistance.
Just having the money to meet the tuition, however, doesn’t guarantee entry to Illinois’ only secondary school dedicated to the arts. Would-be students must take an entrance exam and audition or show a portfolio to a panel of faculty members of the department they wish to enter.
“It was an intimidating situation,” Oliver said. “I was really, really nervous going up to the school. I had just found out about the school itself two weeks before. But they really made me feel welcome.”
Oliver had begun singing only three years before, when she joined her high school’s chorus. Oliver said she didn’t feel very confident; many academy students, like Arnold, have been performing from early childhood.
But perfection isn’t necessarily what the panel is looking for, Mustari said. Talent, desire and ability to learn are the most important attributes for future academy students.
“We look for students who are highly creative, highly individualistic and very dedicated to their art,” Mustari said.
The academy is the brainchild of a group of Chicago-area people, including TV producer Essie Kupcinet and Second City producer Joyce Sloan, who in 1980 agreed to form a committee to research for the public school system the possibility of opening a magnet school for the arts.
The magnet school proved too expensive for the public school system to finance, but the committee, too excited to give up the dream, went ahead with the concept, transforming it into a privately funded institution, which opened in 1981.
Since then, it has been the academy’s goal to turn out well-rounded individuals, not just artists, Mustari said.
“There is no such thing as a dumb artist,” Mustari said. “It has been our philosophy that you can’t succeed unless you are fully educated.”
In keeping with this philosophy, academy students spend their mornings taking the same college preparatory classes that they would have faced at their suburban high schools. But at the academy, the teachers keep the students’ artistic bent in mind.
“The teachers teach creatively,” Oliver said. “For instance, one of my classes is historical foundations of art. They use art to teach history and history to teach art.”
After 1:30 p.m., academy students put their math and science books away and turn their attention to their raison d’etre, their art. The academy allows students to specialize in any of five areas: dance, music, theater, visual arts, or writing and communications. Now they can practice their pirouettes, ink their linoleum etchings, improve their stage techniques or rewrite their poetry. Oliver spends her afternoons taking music theory, sight singing, ear training and piano lessons, followed by voice ensemble or rehearsing for an academy musical production.
Although the school day officially ends at 4:30 p.m., most students end up staying until 6 p.m., practicing what they’ve learned.
“He doesn’t get home until after 7 p.m., and then he does two hours of homework,” said Marinelli’s mother, Lise. “His days are full. He doesn’t go to the mall. He comes home every day. But his passion is music. We’re investing in his education with a lot more than tuition, but he knew that would be part of the program when he decided to go there.”
Lise Marinelli said her son has shown incredible growth in the last 1 1/2 years.
“Musically, it’s a very structured program,” she said. “He takes private piano and guitar lessons, ear training, music theory. He has grown to appreciate not just rock ‘n’ roll but every genre of music you can imagine.”
But even more important is that Marcus has grown to become socially accepting of everyone.
“It’s neat; it’s great to hear your 16-year-old kid argue to defend the right of a kid who is different,” she said. “There is a diversity of people at the academy, and people are accepted there for what they are.”
It was that sense of acceptance and support for fellow students that sold Alice and Michael Arnold on the academy for their daughter Sara.
“We went to the school for a tour and watched an opera performance,” Alice Arnold said. “Everyone was really friendly and warm. I felt the kids in the audience were very supportive of the kids performing. I really liked that. If you sing opera in a regular high school, you might get laughed at.”
Alice Arnold said her only concern was whether the academy could provide the academic courses her daughter would need. She said Mustari assured her the academy offers such classes as calculus and four years of French.
“It has been a really good decision for her,” Alice Arnold said. “She just loves it, really loves it. She has just broadened so much more. She has learned so much more about music. She’s very contented with the school, very happy.”
Jay Kellner, director and co-founder of the Elgin Children’s Choir and choral director at Neuqua Valley High School in Naperville, has directed Sara for the eight years she has been in the Elgin choir. He, too, has seen a change in Sara’s talent since she began attending the academy.
“She has gotten some very good vocal training,” Kellner said. “She is developing very nicely. She has become more attentive to pitch and accuracy.”
Kellner said Sara has always had a voice well beyond her years in maturity, depth and brilliance. He describes it as a beautifully floating soprano that surprises audiences when it emerges from petite, docile Sara.
“I was excited to see her go that route (to the academy) because it is obvious she is a very serious musician,” he said. “There is no way for a student to get that kind of accelerated, in-depth experience in the arts at even the best of public high schools.”
Ted Schneider, 17, a senior musical theater major from Hinsdale, credits the academy with opening doors for him.
In his freshman year, he said, he was given the opportunity to audition for Sandra Grand at the Chicago Dramatist Workshop for a role in Chicago playwright David Rush’s “Ellen Universe Joins the Band.” He got the role. The next summer, Grand recommended him for a part in another production, “Hitting for the Cycles — Nine Original One-Act Plays,” at the Famous Door Theater.
“I’ve been working with seasoned professional actors, studying what they’re doing, being able to be on stage with them and react to what they’re doing,” Schneider said.
“Being at the academy has made me not just an artist but a fuller, more mature person,” he said.
But Judy Oliver was hoping for more than musical training and experience when she first learned about the academy last year. Oliver said her daughter Jessica was targeted as a behavior problem at her former high school and was so depressed that she missed a total of 100 days of school her sophomore and junior years. Jessica, who has decided to repeat her junior year, is blooming now, Oliver said.
“Jessica is different, very creative and highly intelligent, and where before that created problems for her, now she’s accepted,” Oliver said. “It’s a wonderful place for kids who don’t fit in and are talented.
“At the academy, she has made lots of friends. The kids really bond together and are very supportive of each other.”
“Everything is so amazingly better than it was, definitely,” Jessica said.
That support from fellow students, that camaraderie, is one of the things that Craig Hall, a Maywood resident who graduated from the academy in June and is now a student at the School of the American Ballet Theatre in New York City, said he finds himself missing in his new life.
“I miss my friends. I miss everyone,” he said. “The whole experience. How they nurtured me. They saw I was a talented dancer and they pushed me. If I hadn’t gone there, I probably would be at some college, not knowing what I want to do, not thinking about dancing. I loved going there every single day. I knew everyone. That school was like a family.”
That support and encouragement are very important to a young artist, according to Harriet Ross, artistic administrator and outreach coordinator for the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago. Ross said Gerald Arpino, founder and artistic director of the Joffrey Ballet, has used academy dancers in recent performances of “The Nutcracker” and is considering instituting an apprentice program with the academy.
“We are very supportive of what the academy is doing,” Ross said. “It offers excellent training by very fine teachers in an atmosphere where artists can work and be serious and not laughed at, at an age when a lot of people aren’t serious.”
A graduate of the New York High School for the Performing Arts, Ross said she knows the impact such an education can have on a young person’s life.
“Young artists, instead of being respected, often get just the opposite,” she said. “Such a school validates the young artist. The arts need support and validation. We need to help each other.”
