Who Can Attend Orange County High School of the Arts
In less than a decade, Orangish County School of the Arts has become one of the about selective schools in the nation, sending students to elite colleges in loftier numbers. Does this exclusivity change the schoolhouse's mission?
Cassandra Hsiao stepped onto the Orange County Schoolhouse of the Arts campus and instantly felt at dwelling house. She was barely out of grade school, a petite preteen in a floppy chapeau, eager to detect a place to fit in. OCSA seemed "magical and amazing," she recalls six years later. She saw students of all shapes, sizes, and colors, heard show tunes bouncing off narrow stairwell walls, and felt the creative energy. "I loved being there."
She barely noticed how bleak the campus looked to outsiders—a seven-story, deteriorating former bank edifice on Main Street in downtown Santa Ana. Situated amid empty storefronts and fast-food restaurants, OCSA faces government offices that serve the city's poorest residents, and it abuts an enormous clay pile that for years has been scheduled to get Orangish County'due south tallest role tower.
Just looks can deceive, and Cassandra was prescient to see beyond the obvious. When she applied to OCSA, she had no idea how incredibly competitive the school would go. In the six years since she started there, OCSA has emerged as a powerhouse prep with acceptance rates lower than the nation's nearly elite boarding schools.
Thank you to a serendipitous confluence of timing, strategic determination-making, and tireless fundraising, tuition-costless OCSA attracted three,400 applicants for 400 places in 2017. That puts OCSA's acceptance rate at 11 per centum—lower than at The Thacher School (13 percentage), Groton School (12 percentage), Phillips Academy Andover (xiii percent), and Phillips Exeter Academy (19 pct), all of which charge $36,000 or more for tuition annually.
OCSA appeals to families looking for affordable, high-quality, intense, professional arts training and an impressive record of sending students to elite colleges. Since 2011, Stanford has accepted 21 students, UC Berkeley 125, UCLA 160, Harvard ix, Yale seven, Chocolate-brown 12, Columbia 11, Cornell 20, and Princeton eight.
OCSA students come largely from middle- and upper-class families beyond five counties. X percent of the students receive free or reduced-price lunches, compared to 94 per centum in the balance of the Santa Ana commune. In the past six years, enrollment has grown 25 percent—from 1,750 to two,177—even as acceptance rates go along to pass up. Admission hurdles are higher for some of the xiv arts conservatories than others, and acceptance rates can dip into single digits. To provide more opportunities, OCSA launched a new campus outside Orange County in August, hoping to replicate what The Orange County Register called "1 of the more spectacular success stories in modern education."
Atypical SENSATIONS
OCSA'southward graduating grade of 2017 broke records. Stanford accepted six students, and each Ivy League college took at least 2. Cassandra was ane of 5 students nationwide to proceeds credence to all eight Ivy Leagues; Stanford and eight other elite colleges also admitted her.
Looking back, she seems bewildered by her success. "My family couldn't have foreseen whatsoever of it."
Search her name online and up pops a timeline of Cassandra, microphone in hand, interviewing Hollywood'southward biggest celebrities for Scholastic News Press Corps. She's preternaturally sophisticated and polished, first a little girl in floppy hats, then a teenager wearing signature hair bows, finally a woman, manus on hip, confidently commanding the red carpet. That evolution required enormous family sacrifice.
Though other canton high schools rank college academically, they take nearly all their students from within commune boundaries. OCSA students come from 119 cities. Cassandra's parents drove from their dwelling in Walnut to Santa Ana for 8 a.1000. classes.
Afterwards two heart school years of as well much stress and too little sleep, the Hsiaos doubted their girl could continue with OCSA. Merely Cassandra wanted to stay. Despite her parents' reservations, "My mom saw it as a identify where I could thrive. So they let me stay."
At OCSA, "Everyone is good at something, everyone is so talented and deserving," Cassandra says. Sometimes that "can also exist crushing. Because information technology can besides experience like everyone is better and smarter and more talented than I am."
That and then many OCSA students are outstanding in their accomplishments somehow seems implausible. Yet the Register named Cassandra'southward friend Rachel Yuan one of the canton's summit 10 high school visual artists. Their classmate Brianna Satow, who performed at Carnegie Hall equally a junior, won the equivalent accolade for pianoforte. Rachel, Cassandra, and Brianna were amidst the 15 OCSA seniors who graduated final year with a GPA of 4.5 or higher—a record number and a 300 percent increase from 2013.
ROOTS OF SUCCESS
To understand how the stakes rose requires stepping dorsum to 1987, when the offset iteration of OCSA opened. OCSA was a dream with no role model, a partnership betwixt the Los Alamitos Unified School Commune and founder Ralph Opacic.
In a story uncannily similar to the plot of the hit Idiot box bear witness "Glee," Opacic created a nationally recognized bear witness choir at Los Alamitos Loftier School that grew from thirty to 300 students, prompting administrators to inquire him to open an after-school arts solarium. He raised $1 1000000 to explore making the arts program a carve up high school within the commune.
The plan provoked a community furor so extreme that Opacic was unable to accept his family to dinner without someone confronting him about it. The urban center quango filed a lawsuit. Parents protested. "Information technology was a big, ugly, heated state of war," he says.
Merely when the dream seemed over, the phone rang. "Nosotros think Los Alamitos is crazy," Santa Ana Mayor Miguel Pulido told Opacic. "We'd dear to have y'all in downtown Santa Ana."
It was the late '90s, and Santa Ana was revitalizing its inner city. Although thrilled with the offer, Opacic hesitated. "I wasn't sure our families would allow their kids go to downtown Santa Ana. It was yet perceived equally a actually crude surface area." With few other options, he met with city officials and real manor developers.
When Opacic visited his future campus, he found it in a run-down business organization commune across the street from canton social services. He looked around and saw an quondam savings and loan, a church that reeked of urine and mold, and a shabby, vii-story depository financial institution building with narrow stairs and a glacially boring elevator.
While some might have seen urban decay, Opacic saw opportunity. Nearby institutions were growing roots: Bowers Museum, the Discovery Science Center, the Artists Village. He brought families to visit, "and they responded well."
When OCSA opened in Santa Ana in September 2000, Opacic had a charter, $1.eight million in redevelopment funds, $20 million in state financing, and a stable of veteran academic teachers hired away from the highly ranked Los Alamitos commune. "Beingness driven out of Los Alamitos was the best thing that e'er happened to us," he says.
Despite an uncertain beginning—the school nigh went bankrupt in 2002—Opacic and his squad of parents, teachers, and administrators helped OCSA achieve solvency by 2007.
Jim Blaylock, the then-director of creative writing, told parents at a 2007 recruiting nighttime at selective Pegasus Centre Schoolhouse in Huntington Beach that he accepted near of the applicants. Only one Pegasus student practical to OCSA that year. She went on to graduate from Harvard. This year, three Pegasus graduates entered the Harvard class of 2021: 1 from Thacher, one from Andover, one from OCSA.
THE "GLEE" Factor
How did OCSA'due south prestige rise so rapidly between 2007 and today? Ane reason was the growing celebrity of OCSA'south well-nigh famous alumni, Matthew Morrison ('97), who starred as the choir teacher in the Television set show "Glee," which began airing in 2009. Morrison'southward character so closely resembles Opacic he even sings the Bob Dylan archetype "Forever Young," a signature melody Opacic croons at every graduation. Morrison's habit of shouting out OCSA on national publicity junkets stoked applications.
An academic and counseling makeover was underway at the same time. In 2011, parents lobbied OCSA to buy Naviance, an online tool used to guide students to post-high school success. Families can systematically set students for college and careers beginning in middle school, tracking their progress—based on GPA and test scores—against other students accepted to hundreds of schools in the U.Southward. and abroad.
The campus expanded to nine buildings, including a new two-story, $sixteen meg trip the light fantastic, music, and science center, opened in 2015. The church, rechristened Symphony Hall, was remodeled with leather piece of furniture, refinished hardwood floors, and comfortable seats.
Equally with whatever schoolhouse, the faculty, staff, parents, and students gripe about shortcomings. One parent lodged a 15-point critique on a blog last year, accusing OCSA of placing unreasonable academic demands on students that left kids stressed out and sleep-deprived. Responding parents had fiddling sympathy: "The very rigorous academic load is required for my daughter to get into the higher of her choice. She is not planning to pursue her art equally a career. She focuses on academics so she tin can follow her dreams of technology."
Aspiring parents desperate to have their children admitted seek advice wherever they can, especially on an unofficial blog called "The 14th Conservatory." They complain near legacy preferences, nearly "special consideration" given to applicants of uber-involved parents, nigh the lack of official data and transparency, about the inequality OCSA fosters by accepting then many families who hire "personal audience coaches … knowing that most families simply can't afford that."
Wait-list horror stories abound. Families "staying in hotels for weeks" hoping for an acceptance. I anguished parent sought "simply some data to condolement my child." A few parents are evidently pitiless. "Life isn't fair. This is a super-competitive school," one wrote. Exclusivity is a selling signal, said another, "the reason the schoolhouse is and so sought after. … Only the all-time of the best make it. This is not a school for everyone."
Non then, says Opacic. He wants to spread the OCSA dream to other districts, to requite even more students access. OCSA's first attempt to expand ended in 2015 amid parent protests and the ACLU threatening legal action. The proposal to shut an Oceanside middle school with declining enrollment and replace information technology with an OCSA-like charter risked creating an "unjustified disparate impact on Latino students," the ACLU told the local newspaper.
While OCSA'due south original charter set a goal of enrolling 30 percent of its students from Santa Ana, x percent come up from the city. The 30 percent goal "is not a mandate," Opacic says. Past putting schools "in cities like Santa Ana, we are creating greater access and equity for those students who couldn't otherwise get to the states."
A second endeavour to replicate OCSA is underway. The California Schoolhouse of the Arts opened in Duarte in fall 2017, with plans to launch others in the Inland Empire and the S Bay. Over the years, Opacic has advised dozens of schools, and he wants to continue "taking everything we've learned from this feel and helping other schools beyond the country."
DREAMS Exercise COME TRUE
At age 57, Opacic has no plans to retire. Though he might step down from the daily demands of running the schoolhouse, he will continue spreading the winning formula, he says. "I don't play golf. I don't lookout man TV. I don't go to the movies. So this actually is my passion."
Similar Opacic, Cassandra Hsiao found her passion and realized her dreams at OCSA. She read her Harvard acceptance electronic mail twice, through tears. "I just couldn't believe it."
3 months subsequently, TV cameras descended on campus to interview her. All 17 colleges she had practical to accepted her, and the media broadcast her story and application essay to England and Asia. Her story was shared on "Voice of America," in more than twoscore languages to 237 million people. Her social media inboxes flooded.
While Cassandra weighed her options, her OCSA friends decided. Chocolate-brown accepted Brianna Satow, the Carnegie Hall veteran, simply she chose Rice because of a scholarship that pays half her tuition. UCLA accepted Rachel Yuan, but she chose University of Georgia Honors College with a full scholarship, plus travel money. Another friend picked Harvard, another chose Columbia, and ii were headed to Yale.
As the May 1 deadline approached, Cassandra made a YouTube video. Dressed in cap and gown, staring earnestly into the camera, she thanks God, parents, family, friends, teachers, mentors. "It's very humbling to recollect that then many of you could relate to the struggles of being an immigrant, of feeling like an outsider, of grappling with the linguistic communication," she says, acknowledging her viewers for "cheering me on this journey.
"I know a lot of yous have been asking, Where have I decided to become? Well … the reply is … THIS!"
She throws open her gown, revealing a blue Yale T-shirt, equally the song "Bulldog! Bulldog! Bow-wow wow!" plays. With a tentative whoop and an apprehensive fist pump, she shouts out to her iii,500 viewers: "Go Bulldogs! WOOOO!" while the words "I'G A YALIE! BOOLA BOOLA!" dance on the screen.
Susan F. Paterno is an award-winning magazine author and manager of the journalism program at Chapman University. Both her daughters graduated from OCSA and went on to Harvard University.
See Cassandra'due south video below and read her application essay hither.
Source: https://www.orangecoast.com/features/orange-county-school-of-the-arts/
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