The Scholarship Program of the Thomas Armour Youth Ballet: Offering Children from Miami’s Poorest Communities the Gift of Dance

The dance studio at Elizabeth Varrick Park in West Coconut Grove, one of Miami’s poorest communities, looks like it was once a storage room. But it has been retrofitted with a mirrored wall, suspended wooden floor, and ballet barre. There is also a cubby stocked with dance shoes in every conceivable size.  The little girls who dance here often can’t afford their own, and the Thomas Armour Youth Ballet believes the cost of shoes or clothes or transportation should not stand between children in the scholarship program and their love of dance.

It is this love of dance and Thomas Armour’s unique capacity to use this love to catapult children out of poverty that makes the program stand out.  Like many schools of dance, it offers second and third grade children ballet and tap in after-school classes one or two days a week.  For the more advanced, the curriculum becomes more rigorous; the oldest students study 4 ½ - 10 hours a week, including the history and vocabulary of dance. The young artists revel in the dance classes, in part for the predictable routine that they provide; for a population where chaos at home and in the neighborhood is common, this constancy is reassuring.  But dance is the least of it.

Director Ruth Wiesen has created a warm, nurturing environment that, for many students, is a second home. At the school’s headquarters in South Miami, the students come early and stay late to do homework, receive tutoring, work on computers, read in the library.  The youngsters and their families turn to the school administration to resolve myriad problems unrelated to dance. Immigration question? Ask Ruth.  Health problem? Ruth can solve it.  Need help with a college application?  Ruth will help – and the school will underwrite the costs to apply.  And so, the Thomas Armour Youth Ballet becomes a mainstay in its students’ lives. In a summer camp for scholarship students, academic tutoring combines with dance classes and creativity of other sorts. One year, the students made their own costumes. The girls made tutus and the boys made sashes, which they wore for performance and then took home to keep.

For 17-25 of the most advanced students, there are summer intensives at the best companies in New York. The school rents two apartments, one for girls and one for boys, and places a chaperone in each.  The kids, many of whom have never been out of Miami before, take their first plane ride, experience some of the responsibilities of adulthood – managing the apartment budget, creating menus, shopping for groceries,  cooking, and cleaning – and have their horizons broadened.  More important, as the faculty and directors of the companies where they are studying come to know and appreciate them, those who aspire to become professional dancers acquire an advantage in the competition for coveted spots in the troupe.

Many Thomas Armour graduates go on to become professional dancers on Broadway and with such companies as Martha Graham, Alvin Ailey, and American Ballet Theater.  But the real triumph is this: Of those who stay with the program through high school, 100% either dance professionally or go on to college.  Most go on to college, which, in fact, is the goal. 

“Dance is a vehicle,” Ruth explains.  Through dance the children learn a discipline, acquire a focus, come to understand delayed gratification.  These translate into all arenas of life and enable the children to succeed in whatever they do.

In order to enhance their chances of getting into and going to college, Ruth aims to get her students into the best high schools in the county.  The specialty schools and magnet programs devoted to the arts are especially coveted because they offer some of the county’s best secondary education and are thus the surest ticket for success later on.  So Ruth does everything she can to optimize her students’ chances for getting in. When kids stop showing up for class, she calls to find out why. Sometimes they can’t afford a bus pass, and the school pays for transportation.

As Ruth surveyed student rosters in the secondary school arts programs, she discovered that although poor children were in elementary- and middle-school dance magnet programs throughout the county, those who lived far from Thomas Armour  were not gaining admission to the most coveted schools. The problem, she realized, was that they did not have access to after-school classes and could not compete with kids who had did. Solution?  Bring after-school classes to the children.  Thus satellite locations sprang up in low-income neighborhoods throughout Miami-Dade County: Morningside/Little Haiti in 2001, Homestead in 2002, West Grove and Redlands in 2004, Miami Gardens in 2011.   As the satellites emerged, the rate of acceptance of poor children into the best arts programs began to climb.

Georgette Fogel, who grew up in the South Miami projects, credits the New World School of the Arts with giving her the gift of a promising future.  Georgette was invited into the Thomas Armour scholarship program from a third grade dance magnet class at South Miami Elementary School.  She was a bright child and a talented dancer, and Ruth pushed her toward New World.  But at age 13, Georgette also developed a love of basketball and decided instead to attend her local high school, known for a tough student population and weak academics. 

“New World was scary,” Georgette says. The prospect of an audition was terrifying and the required summer classes distasteful.  But Ruth was adamant. She helped Georgette prepare for her audition and offered her support and encouragement throughout. Georgette graduated with straight A’s from New World School in June 2011.  The first in her family to attend college, she is now on full scholarship at Florida State University majoring in exercise physiology and planning to become a dentist.

“It [the New World School] was phenomenal academically,” Georgette  gushes.  She credits small classes and individual attention for fostering her love of writing and poetry and with her overall academic success.  “If I had gone to my local high school, I would not have been as successful there.  I would have been around the wrong people.  Half of them got pregnant or didn’t graduate. And the half that did graduate aren’t going to college.”

Founded in 1951, the Thomas Armour Youth Ballet did not have a scholarship program until 1988.  The program was born when an African American child told Ruth she’d love to be a ballet dancer, but that ballet was for white girls.  Ruth set out to change that perception.   The school began its scholarship program by filling vacancies with children recruited from a nearby elementary school dance magnet program.  Students qualified if they received free or reduced-cost lunch and were not taking after-school classes elsewhere.  In the beginning, there were 20 on scholarship.   Today there are 585, half the student body. The $592,000 annual scholarship budget, raised principally through grants and donations, covers instruction, clothing, equipment, summer intensives (exclusive of tuition, which comes from other scholarships), students’ ancillary needs, and the one-time costs of remodeling/equipping new satellite locations.

Thomas Armour Youth Ballet at the Miami Conservatory
5818 SW 73rd St.
South Miami, FL 33143
Tel: 305 667 5543
www.thomasarmouryouthballet.org