New principal, new programs and new partners bring new opportunities for Dixon students

There are a lot of big changes in store for a little school in Pensacola.

The Dixon School of Arts and Sciences is starting the 2022-2023 school year with a new principal and a new theater program created in partnership with the Equity Project Alliance and an acclaimed New York theater company.

Dixon, a private school "that celebrates the diversity of race, gender, ethnicity and religion," moved to a new facility in 2019 and saw its enrollment more than double from 95 to 210 young scholars. New Principal Kevin Kovacs wants to continue that growth and momentum.

"I do not want to be the best-kept secret. We want the community to know that we're out there so that we can serve more families in the neighborhood and more families in this Pensacola community," Kovacs said.

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Kovacs was recently hired at Dixon, leaving his position director of schools at the Foundations School at the Center for Creative Education in West Palm Beach.

He plans to come into next school year collaborating with the local high school guidance staff and administrators, and meet with Dixon's families, students and teachers.

Kovacs plans to bring in a mentoring program for students who have an interest in any field of STEM or the arts to better support, guide, and model them so they can have a stronger sense of purpose in the pursuit of a career path.

He also wants to implement more STEM education into the school's coursework and find a pathway to feed middle school students into area high schools that have aviation or engineering programs. His plan is to bring in a robotics class and aviation class and combine them with the arts program already in the school.

And of course, he also has plans to expand the schools arts programs.

One of these additional programs will be a theater boot camp provided by the Children’s Theater Company out of New York City.

Eric Dozier, co-founder of the Children’s Theater Company, helped bring the "Henry 'Box' Brown" play to Pensacola this June in partnership with Equity Project Alliance. The Children's Theater Company's goal is to facilitate and build community around the themes of equity and anti-racism so they can engage kids using theater as a tool for moral reasoning.

The boot camp will operate as a Pensacola chapter of the Children's Theater Company, comprised of a dozen Saturday training sessions held over 12 weeks beginning this fall. At the end of the 12 weeks, the program will put on three productions featuring students from three different age groups: 6 to 10, 11 to 14 and 15 to 18.

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Part of the funding for the boot camp and other Dixon programs will come from the Equity Project Alliance. Florida Power & Light donated $50,000 to the Equity Project Alliance at the Dixon School of Arts and Sciences to further its mission of confronting systemic racism and bring about conversations about transformative thinking, unity and equity.

Founding members of EPA like Lusharon Wiley believe this donation can help address inequities in the community, support or create important programs or initiatives and even help develop solutions by continuing conversations around issues of importance in the community.

"The community will look at this as an organization that's not just about talk, but we're also about doing and we've been around now for two years. We brought together diverse groups of people from all over Pensacola," Wiley said.

"Even just the conversations alone, the support that we're getting from the community and from businesses, these are all things that are working together toward a better, a different, a bolder, a more inclusive Pensacola."

Dozier believes the mission of the Children's Theater Company and the Equity Project Alliance align well with each other. Dixon's goal of helping its students through its arts and sciences and the upcoming school theater boot camp will help reinforce the lessons of using the arts to reach people.

"I think thinking is important, but I think art really drives the passion and the emotion and the action," Dozier said. "But what we've also learned is that having a robust arts program, in conjunction with other academic pursuits of the school, really helps to increase literacy, helps to promote a more coherent thinking about issues, and really helps people kind of synthesize what they're doing in other areas of academic pursuit."

Kovacs said he is hopeful EPA's support will help Dixon reach more families in the community who need what Dixon can provide: a very structured, yet creative and dynamic education that is art-rich, science-driven, and small in classroom sizes.

"The more that we can get out there for exposure, the more likely people are to see us and to join our school," he said.

This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Dixon School of Arts and science partners with Children’s Theater Co.