Tatyana Enriquez saw “The Nutcracker” when she was 3 years old, but that was pretty much all she knew about ballet before she started a dance program at her Arizona school. Her friends Dionne Brown, Tiara Holmes and Adrianna Hernandez knew even less.
Now, the girls practice ballet four days a week for 90 minutes each day –– and enjoy it.
“To me, it’s like a yoga thing,” said Tatyana, 14. “It helps me calm down, and it’s just fun to do."
What the girls and their peers don’t realize is that they’re improving academically by participating in the ballet program. They score higher on tests, practice the skills they learn in school and understand how ballet connects with subjects such as history.
“It’s not to them something that someone’s pushing down their throats,” said Camden Lloyd, who founded the program in 2003 for Clarendon and Encanto elementary school students in Phoenix. “It’s disguised totally, and it works.”
They’re not just learning about ballet after school, either. Seven third-grade teachers at Encanto work together to weave ballet into their regular classes, said Renee Hamill, who has taught third grade for five years.
She takes her whole class –– not just the dance students –– to see two ballet performances each year that Lloyd organizes. Before they go to “The Nutcracker,” they read the ballet, learn about nuts, use a nutcracker and study the history of toys, from the mechanical to the robotic versions, she said.
The ballet program, which does not have an official name, motivated one of the boys in her class to do his best in school.
“He was not performing up to potential,” Hamill said. “By the end of the year, his scores were phenomenal.”
This year, the Clarendon ballet students scored 10 percent higher in math and 9 percent higher in reading than their classmates who took district trimester tests, which are correlated to state standardized tests, said Sindi Westberg, Osborn School District’s director of resource development. During the program, a teacher manages study hall for the dancers, and if the students don’t finish their homework, they can’t dance.
When the district worked with Lloyd to start the program, no one knew how well it would go over. Ninety students signed up.
“It completely took everyone by surprise because it was incredibly popular,” Westberg said.
During the first three years, Lloyd worked for free. Then Westberg started writing grant proposals, and the program received a state grant. The students from mostly low-income families pay $2 a year to participate in the program, which qualifies donors for tuition tax credits. Private donors cover expenses for books, supplies and equipment.
While more than 100 kids sign up for the program each year, about 80 of them stick with it after the four-week drop period. The district transports the seventh- and eighth-grade students who’ve been in the program for a while from their middle schools to a multi-purpose building between the two elementary schools. They roll out a dance floor and practice after school.
Ballet helps the students learn concentration and discipline, two skills that they will use the rest of their lives, Lloyd said.
“These are wonderful kids," she said. "They have appetite, they have ambition.”
The students who excel in dancing and in school earn the opportunity to try out for “The Nutcracker,” which professional company Ballet Arizona performs. Twenty-two of her students performed and worked backstage last year, including Tatyana, Dionne and Adrianna.
“You get to do all these things like auditions for ‘The Nutcracker,’” Adrianna said, “and it makes you feel special sometimes.”
*Photo by Jeff Noble
