A Quick History of NSA with Ms. Grantham

A lot of students at Nashville School of the Arts are not familiar with Ms. Grantham, or the large role she has played in the school’s history and the work she does for the school to this day. We sat down with her the other day to discuss that history, and her own personal takes on the school and how it’s changed throughout the years.

We began the recording, “This is Simeon Page and Terry Cook and we are here to interview Ms. Grantham on the history of NSA.”

Ms. Grantham leaned in, “Hello, I am Ms. Grantham, and I am currently a para-pro in the special ed department here at NSA.” Our first few questions centered around the school when it was first founded. Ms. Grantham has been a part of NSA since it was first opened back in 1993, serving as a dance teacher from 1993-2013. She described several struggles that the school had early on, such as finding students who were willing to attend.

In its early years, NSA was not an official school, but rather the arts magnet at Pearl Cohn. “A school within a school,” she described it, and that it was. While the overall student population of Pearl Cohn was much larger, the population of the arts magnet was only about fifty students, and due to the lack of audition process for the program, often they would have students join that weren’t necessarily interested in their art.

“I didn’t think the program was being run the way it should be run,” she recalled. “We, for many years, didn’t have auditions so anybody could just get into the school. For a time, we had half audition and half lottery, so that was weird. We would just end up with a lot of students who just didn’t want to go to their zone school. For instance, they might want to be a majorette at Pearl Cohn and still go to NSA. Sometimes that would cause a conflict of interest in rehearsal times after school.” Despite those doubts, she stayed with us and got to see the school evolve into much more than it was originally.

Starting off, there were no conservatories at NSA. They were instead referred to as departments. There was an art department and a dance department and so forth. Eventually those departments grew into conservatories as the school grew alongside them. Some conservatories like the Literary Arts did not exist for a long time until they were eventually implemented, and other conservatories such as Mass Media Arts fell by the wayside. Ms. Grantham made a point that the specific art she has seen evolve the most over the years has been music.

“When I first started, they just had chorus and band. Now they have added guitar, piano, orchestra, and songwriting,” she said proudly.

Her final point had to do with the school itself, as in the building. The NSA building has been a matter of controversy pretty much since the school was founded. We previously mentioned how NSA started as a part of Pearl Cohn, but once the school broke away from Pearl Cohn, Metro had a bit of trouble finding where they were going to put the school. Former Metro Schools Director Pedro Garcia suggested “remodeling the crumbling Nashville School of the Arts and building a new arts middle school right next door on the nineteen-acre campus in Bordeaux.” It remained an issue for so long that it, well, is still an issue over twenty years later. The school had a five-year lease at the TPS (Tennessee Preparatory School) campus until it got the new building that Mayor Bill Purcell had promised. Those five years turned into ten which turned into twenty which turned into the present where we still have not received that new campus. However, we are currently in talks with BAUER ASKEW Architecture and are hopeful that their proposal will be approved by MNPS in the next year or so.  (Read about updates for a new building in this quarter's articles, "An Interview with Dr. Thomas on our New Building: "It's going to be world-class."and "A Permanent Home for NSA- 30 Years in the Making.")

Our school is such a unique place for all sort of people to come and practice and perfect their art whatever it may be, and despite being relatively new, it has such a rich and interesting history that is always fun to hear from new perspectives.