History
In the 1980s, a group of arts teachers proposed to the School District that a school of the arts be developed in Palm Beach County. A survey was sent out to gauge community interest in the development of a school of the arts. The community’s response was overwhelmingly positive. It was also at this time that the School District was looking to magnet programs as an alternative to forced integration through involuntary busing.
What began as the Palm Beach County School of the Arts opened on the campus of the old North Shore High School in 1990 with an enrollment of 250 students in grades 7-9, specializing in five areas of arts study: Communication Arts, Dance, Music, Theatre, and Visual arts. Each year, a new 7th grade class was added until 1994 when the school housed students from grades 7 through 12, and the school graduated its first class.
Known as the Palm Beach County School of the Arts, it was previously located on the former site of North Shore High School, now BAK Middle School of the Arts, in Mangonia Park.
As the school grew, so did the need for a larger, state of the art facility. Through negotiation and the hard work of the Palm Beach County School Board, the Historical Society of Palm Beach County, and a non-profit group funding the school's additional needs, the School of the Arts Foundation (SOAFI), the Central Schools site in downtown West Palm Beach. The former campus of Twin Lakes High School was the original home of the PBC School of the Arts. Twin Lakes was founded in 1908 as Palm Beach High School; it was established one year before the founding of the county itself and is the oldest high school in the county. Originally for whites, Palm Beach High merged in the 1970-1971 school year with the black Roosevelt High School following integration, forming Twin Lakes High School.
The campus underwent significant renovations to become the new home of the School of the Arts in 1997 after Alexander W. Dreyfoos provided the majority funding for the project when he made the largest private contribution ever made to a public school in Florida, pledging $1,000,000 to support the Palm Beach County School of the Arts, which was subsequently renamed in his honor, the Alexander W. Dreyfoos School of the Arts (DSOA).
The school celebrated the site's 100-Year Celebration with the "100 Years on the Hill" event.
In 2010, Burt Reynolds who graduated from the campus when it was Palm Beach High, returned to the campus for a dedication of the front drive, now used as a pick-up/drop-off for the school as "Bert Reynolds Drive."
Read more about this topic: Dreyfoos School Of The Arts
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