Tara Performing Arts High School puts every student on a stage at some point, yet most of them grow up to do something completely different. That's by design.
The school started small. In the early '90s, its founders, who'd all trained as Waldorf educators, ran an after-school theater program in Boulder while they figured out what a full four-year high school built around the performing arts as a vehicle for human development would actually look like. When they finally opened to a ninth-grade class in the fall of 1997, families were already on board.
“They'd felt the impact of how they were working with the performing arts to deepen these students' experiences, who they could become in their lives,” says Catherine Barricklow, a Tara alum who now teaches and chairs the Leadership Council at the school.
When the Play Takes Over
Catherine says the thing that sets Tara apart is the schedule. In the two weeks before a production opens, regular classes stop. Students are in the theater from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., sometimes later, and for that stretch, the play is the only thing going on.
“It's not a space where, if you're rehearsing a play, you also have to be worrying about a chemistry test,” she says. “And you're really connecting deeply with those other people in the process.” It’s a deliberate rejection of the multitasking most teenagers are taught to operate under. At Tara, for two weeks, there is exactly one thing happening, and everyone is doing it together.
Life After the Spotlight
Ask Catherine where Tara graduates end up, and theater is seldom the answer. She lists them: an EPA attorney who is also a poet, a journalist, a doula, an artist who studied neurophysiology, a firefighter, an ultra-endurance bike packer and racer. Few of them are actors. All of them, she says, spent four years learning to play someone else.
“If you've spent your high school years playing characters who are not like yourself, the ability to have compassion and interest and empathy for people who are supposedly different from you is just so much greater,” she says. “I think that's an important gift that our graduates are giving the world.”
A Schedule Built Around the Work
On Mondays and Wednesdays, students are on campus until 6 p.m. During the fall semester, that includes two extra hours of choir practice while the school preps for its Christmas candlelight festival. Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays end earlier, leaving time for outside activities like sports or orchestras. Every morning, students drop their phones in a box before class. They've done this since 2012.
The travel program works the same way the theater does: nothing happens in isolation. Ninth graders go to New York while they're studying art history. Tenth graders raft 84 miles of the San Juan River as part of a geology unit. Eleventh graders spend a week in the mountains reading nothing but Hamlet. Seniors get the most: marine biology in Mexico, a river expedition, Russian literature in the mountains, and a month in Europe tied to everything they've studied that year.
None of it is optional. Neither, Catherine says, is who gets to attend. Tara has spent more than three decades making sure a family's finances don't decide who takes part. “We are committed to making sure that no one is turned away due to lack of funds,” she says.
During production weeks, the students give up their evenings too, sometimes staying until 9 p.m. Catherine says the payoff shows up later, in graduates who can sit with someone unlike themselves with empathy and curiosity. That’s not something you can put on a syllabus.
To learn more, visit TaraHighSchool.org
"If you've spent your high school years playing characters who are not like yourself, the ability to have compassion and interest and empathy for people who are supposedly different from you is just so much greater." — Catherine Barricklow
"You're really connecting deeply with those other people in the process." — Catherine Barricklow