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| Nash Flores helped raise more than $30 million in private funds to renovate Booker T. Washington in the Arts District. |
Workmen in hard hats were securing the last panels of zinc siding to the new theater at Dallas’ expanded and refurbished arts magnet high school this summer as Nash Flores stood in the Green Room courtyard where the school’s young artists rehearse and sketch. He was admiring their view of the Arts District, where I.M. Pei’s Myerson Symphony Center and Renzo Piano’s Nasher Sculpture Center will soon be joined by Norman Foster’s Winspear Opera House and Rem Koolhaas’ Wyly Theatre—a parade of Pritzker Prize-winning architects. “It’s a constant reminder and inspiration of where the students are headed, and the greatest learning laboratory in the nation,” Flores said.
Flores is the co-founder of private equity firm Ceres Capital Partners, and he’s so proud of the new facility for the Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts—the nation’s preeminent arts school—that it’s fair to call him biased. He was the moving force behind its construction. The story of how Dallas, with its perennially cash-strapped public school system, spent $55 million to restore Booker T’s historic building and more than double its size is an unlikely tale. But its very improbability sheds light on how business and philanthropy can combine to strengthen excellence in a public school system often regarded as a mere babysitting service for the mediocre.
Booker T. Washington High School opened its doors on Flora Street in 1922, a year before the city got its first automated traffic light, in a neighborhood that had been settled after the Civil War by freed slaves. It was known to blacks at the time as “north Dallas.” Booker T was named after the education reformer whose daughter later taught there. It would serve as the city’s only high school for black students for 17 years.
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| The arts magnet’s old building crammed 700 kids in a space meant for 400, but the new one has plenty of room. |
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| Flores with Sharon Modaberri-Cornell, a 15-year employee and ’79 graduate of the school. |
In 1976, it became an arts magnet as the city struggled to desegregate its schools. But it had few neighbors downtown besides parking lots and a couple of burger joints. Not until 1984 did the Dallas Museum of Art complete its move down the street. “We were the first,” says Sharon Modaberri-Cornell, who has worked for the school for 15 years and was a ’79 graduate of the new arts school.
A decade later, the school district considered demolishing a deteriorating Booker T. Thanks to its intact façade, though, the school was granted Landmark status in 1989. By then most of what had been the heart of black cultural and commercial life in Dallas had been razed, paved over by Central Expressway, or rechristened “Uptown” and destined for pricey condos. The shotgun shacks, the woman who sold beans to Booker T students for 10 cents a bowl, the historic black churches like Hope Baptist and Boll Street Colored Methodist—all were long gone. And by the late ’90s Booker T looked almost unsalvageable. More than 700 students were crammed between walls meant for 400. Classes convened in stairways and halls to accommodate the crush. Extension cords ran across floors to circumvent subpar electrical connections. Sometimes teachers had to decide: do we turn on the fans or the computers? Then, in 1999, the auditorium roof caved in after a big storm. It rained inside the school.
The district and the Booker T advisory board began to tally a long list of structural needs and realized they needed $1 million just to rewire the building. That was when a much more ambitious plan to remake Booker T began to germinate. The key to the effort would be Dallas itself. But would a city inured to constant racial bickering, pork-barrel spending, and patronage in its school system support the expansion of one of the district’s few shining stars?
To launch the effort and give it credibility, Flores first went national. A National Endowment for the Arts program called New Public Works that encouraged high design in civic buildings was asked for a grant. Booker T got a mere $50,000 to offer as prize money for a design competition, but it was a start. After tripling that amount through additional fundraising and pitting 80-plus architects against each other, Flores had himself a plan, and with it he cornered the new DISD superintendent. In January 2001, Flores asked Dr. Mike Moses for matching district funds.
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| A violin student practices in the outdoor quad. |
Moses had been on the job just a few days. The school board was fractious, nearly a quarter of the district’s students were being taught in portable classrooms, and the district as a whole had more than $1 billion of need. “I thought after our first meeting, this is a long shot,” Moses says. “But I could not help but be impressed by his sincerity. I like to dream, and I like people who are dreamers. Nash was so tenacious, with such a powerful story to tell. He articulated a vision not only for the arts high school but the Arts District as a whole, about what would be the nation’s foremost visual and performing arts public high school.”
The district was eventually able to pony up $23 million for Booker T from a 2002 bond issue, which left Flores and key advisors like his longtime friend Mary McDermott Cook to raise more than $30 million to close the gap. At first, many questioned why they should donate money to a public school. Flores says his early pitches generated responses along the lines of: “Isn’t that what my taxes are for?” But eventually, as his team spread the word about this pocket of excellence in DISD, many came to realize that the newly conceived Booker T could be an even greater asset to the city.
Flores nearly groans at mention of the phrase “public-private partnership” (that label is so worn out, he says), but what they were attempting was unprecedented for a public high school. Even the recent overhaul of Boston Latin School, perhaps the most illustrious public school in America, cost less than $40 million, and it was publicly funded. But Flores’ affection for the school was infectious. He won over many donors by telling the Booker T story of the creative combustion that occurs when an ambitious student body is lit up from the spark of impassioned teaching. He told them about dozens of students like Kayla Escobedo, who rode public transportation three hours a day to attend Booker T and who doubted her family could ever afford to send her to college. Today Escobedo is a freshman at Harvard.
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| Dance students barely had enough headroom to leap in the old space, but now they have a multistory studio. |
Despite its crumbling, overcrowded facilities, Booker T had built an impressive educational program and had become a prototype for arts magnets nationwide. Dallas is home to two of the top magnet schools in the nation (TAG and Science and Engineering), but Booker T held its own, producing 18 Presidential Scholars and turning out performers such as singers Norah Jones, Erykah Badu, and Edie Brickell, jazz pianist Frank LoCrasto, and Lost actress Elizabeth Mitchell.
“An artist is going to thrive no matter what. But it was very unfair to the students,” says Modaberri-Cornell, whose grandparents, parents, and three children also attended Booker T. “If we were producing that type of talent before, in a space like that—it’s endless now what they can accomplish.”
Burt Tansky, CEO of the Neiman Marcus Group, had no connection to Booker T and didn’t know much about the school before Flores made his pitch. His family gave upward of $250,000, and Tansky chaired the corporate fundraising committee. “All schools are terribly important to every community, but a school of this quality and this magnitude helps the city to become world-class,” he says. “It adds to the city’s strength. It’s as valuable to the city as any of the arts institutions. And they desperately needed the money.”
Flores and his battalion of fundraisers eventually secured donations from more than 1,000 individuals, foundations, and corporations. The largest private contribution came from philanthropist Nancy Hamon, who gave $10 million. In all, $33.3 million in private funds was raised, $1.3 million more than the goal. In 2006, to accommodate construction, Booker T’s students were sent to temporary classrooms; in April of this year they returned. Dance student Harry Feril, who had literally scraped his head on the low ceiling of the temporary school, took one look at the multistory dance studio and leapt from one side of the room to the other. The new wing added 170,000 square feet of studio and performance space ensconced in a contemporary plum brick with iron flashing that echoes the adjoining historic brick building. Inside, the open industrial design with exposed ductwork, concrete floors, and soaring ceilings evokes Andy Warhol’s Factory (minus the bacchanalia and drag weddings).
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| Molly Welch, part of the last class that will have spent time at both the old and new schools, says, “I feel like I’m in the art, I’m part of it.” |
“It’s incredible,” says Molly Welch, a senior and student ambassador for the school. She is part of the last class that spent time in both the old and new Booker T. Settling onto a bench in the courtyard after school one recent afternoon, she gives the new facility rave reviews, extolling the professional feel of the new Montgomery Theatre, where students are preparing the stage for what will be the inaugural performance, a work adapted from Moliere called Scapino. She’s in awe over the transparent internal design of the building, where one is surrounded by the hum and motion of young artists at work the moment you walk through the front doors. “I feel like I’m in the art, I’m part of it,” she says, looking skyward and pulling her knees toward her heart. “It’s so nice to be back home. We are so lucky.”
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