The High School for the Performing and Visual Arts (HSPVA or PVA for short) is a secondary school located at 4001 Stanford Street in the Montrose district of Houston, Texas. The school is a part of the Houston Independent School District.
The school serves grades nine through twelve. The school is divided into six departments: instrumental music, vocal music, dance, theater (including technical theater), visual arts, and creative writing (new to the 2011-2012 school year). Visual Arts was formed by the merging of what were formerly separate art and media departments. Students are required to audition for entry under one, and only one, art area. When they audition for the school, they can audition for more than one department and may be accepted for multiple departments but when applying must choose one. At the end of every semester students complete a re-audition or portfolio review which does not determine whether or not they return to the school; re-auditions serve as a final grade for each art area.
Students who fail academics are placed on art area probation which makes them ineligible to participate in art area activities. If a student repeatedly fails his or her art area or academics he may be removed from the school.
HSPVA was placed as the top school in the Greater Houston Area by Children at Risk's 2009 annual ranking of high schools, and it still remains on the top ten list in 2012.
HSPVA does not automatically take in students from the surrounding neighborhood; the surrounding neighborhood is zoned to Lamar High School.
Read more about High School For The Performing And Visual Arts: Art Areas, History, Demographics, Admissions Patterns, Notable Alumni
Famous quotes containing the words high, school, performing, visual and/or arts:
“The high plains, the beginning of the desert West, often act as a crucible for those who inhabit them. Like Jacob’s angel, the region requires that you wrestle with it before it bestows a blessing.”
—Kathleen Norris (b. 1947)
“The happiest two-job marriages I saw during my research were ones in which men and women shared the housework and parenting. What couples called good communication often meant that they were good at saying thanks to one another for small aspects of taking care of the family. Making it to the school play, helping a child read, cooking dinner in good spirit, remembering the grocery list,... these were silver and gold of the marital exchange.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)
“Do you see that kitten chasing so prettily her own tail? If you could look with her eyes, you might see her surrounded with hundreds of figures performing complex dramas, with tragic and comic issues, long conversations, many characters, many ups and downs of fate,—and meantime it is only puss and her tail.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The chess pieces are the block alphabet which shapes thoughts; and these thoughts, although making a visual design on the chess-board, express their beauty abstractly, like a poem.... I have come to the personal conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists.”
—Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968)
“I haven’t seen so much tippy-toeing around since the last time I went to the ballet. When members of the arts community were asked this week about one of their biggest benefactors, Philip Morris, and its requests that they lobby the New York City Council on the company’s behalf, the pas de deux of self- justification was so painstakingly choreographed that it constituted a performance all by itself.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)