School Dist. 5 Project Challenge Site Decision Stirs Community
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
Anderson County School Dist. 5’s meeting Tuesday is likely to run long due an item not on the agenda.
A flurry of comments are expected in the public comments part of the meeting regarding the board’s plan to alter a long partnership of allowing the use of space at the old North Anderson Elementary School for Project Challenge, a student program which has been used for drama and theater productions.
In a statement from Anderson School District 5, the current plan is to take the Project Challenge Playhouse facility off its list of community-use buildings because of building condition concerns and the scope of needed repairs. The district says it cannot responsibly continue making the building available for programming. No details have been made available yet on those issues and costs.
The statement maintains it is not ending support for Project Challenge Playhouse or the arts, insisting the nonprofit may request use of other available District 5 auditoriums without a rental fee under the community-use policy, though Project Challenge would have to cover operating costs such as technology, custodial services, security and other staffing needed to open the facility.
District 5 maintains Project Challenge Playhouse, a non-profit, and the district are separate legal entities, so decisions about whether the Playhouse continues operating with its own board of directors. The district says it recognizes the program’s nearly 40-year impact and remains willing to work with it on a “responsible and sustainable” alternative facility arrangement.
The district also held out the potential of continued Project Challenge use of the facility with the additional responsibility of paying for maintenance, technical requirements, security and other associated costs. The board also referenced the possibility of using other facilities in the district, but those options are limited.
Southwood Academy of the Arts and Robert Anderson middle schools and Calhoun Academy of the Arts represent the only reasonable facilities, and both Southwood and Calhoun stages are generally busy. Such use of another facility would not require a rental fee, but would require basic custodial, security and tech fees.
Few details on actual costs either to maintain/use facilities have been available so far, but the school board is charged with keeping the budget reasonable, which often requires challenges of its own.
Project Challenge began as a gifted and talented program in the district in the 1970s, residing in the white building beside the school, which was sold in 1986 when North Anderson Elementary was closed, with its 150 students divided between Concord Elementary and Whitehall Elementary. Special education students were transferred to Varennes Elementary and three classes of emotionally handicapped pupils to Nevitt Forest Elementary.
Project Challenge classes were moved to North Anderson’s newer addition behind the main building located at 2005 N. Main St. with Adult education classes meeting moving to the main building,
In January of 1993, Project Challenge moved briefly to the old stage in the chorus room at McCants Middle School (former T.L. Hanna High School drama stage), only to return to the North Anderson facility in the fall of that same year, where it has remained.
In the decades that followed, the district has made some improvements, including the name on the auditorium, upgraded costume storage area, lighting, and some technical improvements (along with some other maintenance).
Project Challenge leaders say School District 5’s decision not to make the building available to the program directly threatens the future of the youth theater organization.
Joey Opperman, an attorney and a Project Challenge board member and former participant in the program, said losing the mainstay would be a loss for the community.
“We believe that denying Project Challenge Playhouse access to the facility that it has used for 38 out of the last 39 years is tantamount to a death sentence for that program,” Opperman said.
While the disagreement has developed into a public debate about a building’s condition, access to other district facilities and the cost of operating a volunteer-led performing-arts program. Beneath those questions is a deeper one: What happens when a school district withdraws the dependable space from a program founded to recognize students whose talents can be difficult to measure by ordinary academic means?
In its early years, District 5 leaders wanted to serve students who were academically gifted. In the early days of Project Challenge, then director Anna Pruitt, and Diane Britenburg, a teacher of gifted students and former drama teacher at Westside High School at the time, argued that giftedness was not confined to advanced scores in English, science or mathematics.
They were looking for singers, dancers, actors, actresses and public speakers. They wanted to find the children whose abilities emerged through a monologue, a song, a piece of creative writing or a performance before an audience.
From the beginning, Project Challenge was limited by money and staffing. It began with fewer than 100 elementary students identified as academically gifted. But it grew quickly, eventually reaching more than 840 students in a single year.
As funding increased, the program expanded beyond classroom academic enrichment. Drama, music and art became part of its work. Art teachers provided after-school instruction to about 100 students, and the district added six art teachers to broaden the offerings.
Their work offered one of the clearest expressions of the program’s philosophy, folding drama, creative writing and oral interpretation into English instruction, treating literature not simply as something read silently and analyzed at a desk, but as something embodied, spoken and performed.
The program’s visual- and performing-arts component extended into the junior highs. At McCants Junior High, collecting student scripts and hold auditions for fifth- and sixth-grade playwrights. At Lakeside Junior High, it included staging a musical with seventh graders. At Southwood Junior High, other dramatic projects were planned.
These were not conceived merely as school entertainments but created with the idea that the arts could pull out the hidden talents that conventional classes might fail to reveal.
For several generations of District 5 students, Project Challenge Playhouse offered exactly that.
“I was a Project Challenge kid,” Opperman said.
He began participating at age 8, and though he has been on the board only a few months, his relationship with the program extends across most of his life.
“Part of the reason I made it through is that program,” he said.
The phrase carries more than one meaning. A youth theatre can offer artistic instruction, but it can also offer structure, friendship, adult guidance, responsibility and a place to belong. Former students have begun sharing such stories online since the dispute became public, recalling the productions, relationships and confidence that grew out of their years with Project Challenge.
“There are not just hundreds but thousands of kids whose lives are better because of their involvement,” Opperman said.
He said his own participation helped prepare him for later community work, including voter-targeting work in support of District 5’s 2006 bond referendum, which financed new schools and arts facilities throughout the district.
“I would not have been able to make that invaluable contribution to that victory for our school district if it wasn’t for Project Challenge Playhouse,” Opperman said.
His point is not that every former student goes on to work in politics or public advocacy, but that communities often receive back, years later, the confidence and competence they were willing to invest in children.
“There are hundreds, probably thousands of people who have similar stories about what they’ve been able to give back to this community because of what that program did for us,” he said.
Project Challenge’s board was recently told the North Anderson School facility would no longer be available, Opperman said. The board asked for one more year of access, particularly for current students and those expected to enter the program. Opperman said the request was denied.
“What was communicated to the (Project Challenge) board was nothing more than that the facility will be unavailable,” Opperman said.
The district statement issued Saturday followed significant public reaction from alumni, parents and friends of the program, according to Opperman. He said the statement contained reasons that had not been communicated clearly to the Project Challenge board beforehand.
“If these are in fact the reasons that the district, that the school board made its decision, why they didn’t share those reasons with the board beforehand, it is puzzling,” he said.
North Anderson School is not a new building. Opperman, noting that it still has a coal chute and was likely constructed during the Roosevelt administration.
“It’s not news to anyone that that building is not a spring chicken,” he said.
Its age is not the sole issue. Project Challenge’s leaders say the program has worked in that old building for decades, and they question why the facility is suddenly unsuitable if other activities, including adult education, continue there.
“If the building’s not OK, what happened this August that all of a sudden it was OK last year but it’s not OK now?” Opperman said, noting that the question represents his own view, not necessarily the position of the entire board.
The larger concern is not simply whether another building might be found. Project Challenge is a volunteer organization that raises its own money. A theatre program requires more than an occasional room: it needs regular rehearsal time, a stage, lighting and technical access, storage for costumes and sets, predictable dates for performances and a location that families and volunteers can reliably use.
“Project Challenge remains and has been an all-volunteer board,” Opperman said. “It raises its own money.”
He said the other District 5 facilities that might be available in theory, could be cost prohibitive due to staffing, technical and scheduling costs.
“When you are doing theater with high school and middle school, as with any consistent recurring activity with young people, there needs to be some predictability as to availability,” Opperman said.
Without that predictability, he said, the program cannot easily plan a season or retain the volunteer labor on which it depends.
Opperman said he does not believe all school board members are acting with bad intentions. He suspects some may not have understood that a denial of stable access to the North Anderson School facility could mean the loss of Project Challenge Playhouse itself.
“I think there are members of the board who may not have understood that denying access to this particular building, denying access for Project Challenge to a regular recurring space, is tantamount to the destruction of the program,” he said.
He said the coming school board meeting Tuesday to expand the discussion offer hopefully provide an opportunity for members to reconsider. His approach has remained notably conciliatory, particularly for someone who believes the program faces an existential decision.
“I believe in this school board,” he said. “I believe they have the best interests of our children at heart. They have the opportunity to prove that.”
He cited a line commonly attributed to Maya Angelou: “You do the best you can until you know better. But when you know better, you do better.”
The school board’s next steps will be watched by former Project Challenge students, parents, volunteers and, perhaps most importantly, the young people who need to know whether the program will be there when they arrive.
“This is not about adults arguing about a political issue,” Opperman said. “This is about what’s good for the children who are in our schools in District 5 right now.”
Students notice where adults make room for them. They notice when the things they are told matter — creativity, confidence, expression, participation — are supported by something as concrete as a stage and a key to a building.
“Children don’t so much listen to what we say,” Opperman said. “They watch what we do.”
Project Challenge began with the belief that a school system should look beyond the obvious markers of success. It sought the student whose gift might surface only when handed a script, invited to audition, asked to read aloud or given the permission to perform.
The program’s future now rests on a similar act of recognition: whether District 5 sees a decades-old youth theatre not as a not only a financial challenge attached to an aging building, but as a living part of the educational promise Project Challenge was created to fulfill.
