Interview with Dr. Thomas: Foundations of a New School

By Finn Slayton, Gray Wright, & Grace Wilson 

“We've had several opportunities already and will continue to engage students in being part of focus groups.” 

Justin Thomas (Dr. Thomas) has been the principal at Nashville School of the Arts for 4 years. He is a hard worker who always gives everything he has to the students and faculty of this school. You can often spot him standing at the school’s entrance helping our students get through the Evolv detectors quickly and efficiently, or even playing saxophone in Mr. Rosson’s class when he has a free moment. Recently, our Centerstage and Journalism Team interviewed Dr. Thomas about the new school building. This is a follow-up from an interview last year by senior Jewells Reed, which you can read online at NSA Backstage. We recorded this new interview to see what additional information Dr. Thomas can share and ask him new questions from NSA students. The video interview was published on the Centerstage YouTube channel on Wednesday, December 3^rd. 

Will we have more students? Are there rough blueprints made? Is the building real? Read below where all your questions are answered.   

With the plan for the new building, do you anticipate more students coming to NSA? 

T: The building is going to be built for 1,000 students. For now, we are at 578 this morning, so almost double.  

Will the weapons detections system (Evolv) be installed, and will there be more of them? 

T: Probably more... We will probably have one primary entrance point that’ll be designed with multiple [gates] to accommodate 2 lines, so that we can have the same speed of entry. 

With the design of the building, will it be colorful? Do you have any ideas?  

T: Several steps have happened along the way. We’re going on a trip to Washington DC in a couple weeks to see another school there. We’ve been to Denver, we’ve been to Dallas, we've been to Austin [TX], just to see what existing modern art schools have been built in the last 10-15 years. We're seeing how they’re set up organization wise, how they’re set up as far as art, how do they stand out as an art school?  

Will students be considered with the design of the new building? 

T: We’ve had several opportunities already and we’ll continue to engage students in being part of focus groups, to look at what the designers and planners have decided as far as architecture or ask their input about what would they like to see in terms of their experience both [academically] and artistically, and just making us stand out as an arts high school. 

Do you have a team of staff or faculty that travel with you [to see the schools?] 

T: So, Ms. Schnetzer, Mr. Rosson, and Ms. Perry, a previous dance teacher, accompanied me on the trip to Dallas two years ago at the beginning of this process. I mostly travel now with the district people who are part of the central office. It’s just especially during the school year: it’s hard to pull people out of their classrooms, for teachers, missing school is almost more work than being at school, because you have to catch up so much on the days you’re not here.  

We do have teachers come here for meetings with architects and designers. Every two weeks or so we have a new meeting where they say, “how about this?” and we change it and we keep adding on to make it better. 

Do you have a rough blueprint of the building? 

T: The long term is: Finish the blueprints in the next few months, get the cost, then send it out to general contractors for bidding, where then big construction firms would tell us what they think it should cost the district to build it, and the district picks one of those and then they have to go to city council. 

T: That’s the next big funding thing: the city and the mayor’s office [have] to approve the construction cost, which will be a pretty big one the city puts on a lot of money to Metro Schools; to run the schools but also to do renovations and build new buildings, so we’re hopeful that the wind blows the right way for Metro government to support the cost. Pretty soon, hopefully good news to share. 

Very, VERY tentative dates: 

• Summer 2026 Begin demolition of some surrounding buildings 

• Summer 2027 Break ground on new building 

• August 2029 Open new school  

Again - this is assuming no funding, zoning, codes, acts of God, and/or construction hiccups. 

Regarding new spaces in the building, will any spaces be built to be bigger such as: Roxy, Artist Lab, Dance rooms? 

T: This will blow your mind: it’s going to be so cool. There will be a theater that is twice the size [of] the one we have now, with an orchestra pit, with a fly rig for Peter Pan, Elphaba, things like that... I can’t put words into it, but there will be a separate recital hall, for example, where everyone shares the Roxy to do all their [performances], you know the orchestra’s got to strip the stage... now there will be an entirely separate rehearsal hall, and a separate rehearsal space, which will double as a black box theater. There’s going to be so many different things happening.  

Is our building approved by the state, or is there a chance the new building won’t happen? (which has happened in previous years—see previous NSA Backstage articles online) 

T: So the money has been allocated for the design; it’s what’s happening right now. I feel good about it, but you’re very wise to notice that this is a process that this community has started before, only then somebody pumped the brakes and didn’t fund the actual building. I tell people that I’ll believe it when I’m sitting in an air-conditioned office. Until then we all have to remain skeptical because anything can go sideways. If leadership and government changes, if some new priority comes up that’s an emergency in the city... You know, if I-40 falls into a pit in the middle of rush hour, all of a sudden, we have a new infrastructure project to do, and an arts school becomes very much not the first priority. 

I think the desire is there for this to happen, but we should all be cautious about being optimistic until we start seeing things coming out of the ground. 

Will the new buildings have Promethean boards like NSA now, or will we try another company? Is that even a choice for NSA, or is it over our heads? 

T: I think they’ll come equipped with whatever the standard is, but I think that standard will be as good as if not better than what we have currently as far as modern technology. 

Do you believe the building will be more technologically advanced than the current one, or do you think it will be the same, especially in classrooms? 

T: Yes it will be better. Here’s one thing about it, one feature: it’s going to have several recording studios both in Media Arts: a soundstage and podcast booths. Same for Guitar: we’ll have control rooms, isolation booths, say one for guitar one for drums one for vocals. But mainly we’ll have sound recording and video recording throughout the school. Mr. Murphey could sit in a control room in this corner of the school and be able to communicate with and record things happening in the recital hall across campus.

So, it's going to be just totally rigged up to the nines on technological capacity and recording and audio and visual and everything else.   

With these new spaces for our programs and these new technologies, do you think there's a chance that that will increase inter conservatory mingling and events? 

T: So a lot of what the conversation with the designers has been has been to prioritize what you're talking about, because we already know that NSA is at its best when conservatories work together and find ways to support each other's art. 

T: But the actual layout, for example, [currently] we have dance next to math, which math kind of puts up with, but it can be kind of noisy sometimes. And so dance shouldn't be afraid to, you know, make a bunch of noise and dance and sing and stomp and all the things that they are supposed to do. 

T: Right now, Ms. Graening is way uptown, so far away from the music conservatories, so we're talking now about what's called a neighborhood approach. Right now in the new building, it's like guitar into choral, into orchestra, into band, into piano, which links across the hall, into theater, into media arts, into visual arts. So we’re trying to make everything that touches each other have some relevance with each other. 

T: So it's just like this big color wheel circle of the conservatories that you most likely would partner with are pretty much right next to you. Pretty much right now, it's very much a hodgepodge of dance and math and science and choir. Mr. Rosson is nowhere near Mr. Jacobs or Ms. Graening. 

T: Like for example, Ms. Schnetzer and Ms. Profitt and Mr. Wren are kind of near each other, but they're not near each other the way that we would want them to be. So it's cool that this is a building that's going to exist from the very beginning. To be thoughtful about those collaborative necessities. 

T: The plan right now is they're being really careful not to interrupt the activities at this building. They had a little bit of a hard time figuring that out at first, but they've been able to move some things around on the blueprint, where there may be construction right up against the corner of the existing building, but we'll be able to operate in this school until the very last minute. 

T: It will probably be a situation where we finish the school year, and then like the day after school ends, they start knocking stuff down to be able to make room for parking lots and other things. 

What would you personally say to students who don’t care about the construction of the new building because they will graduate before it is finished? 

T: There’s an old saying; “A wise man plants seeds for a tree in whose shade he shall never sit.” We’re all a part of our legacy. Even if it means not getting immediate gratification for the work that we put in. We’re all here for some reason on Earth, so we might as well contribute to making it a better place and dream of a better tomorrow, even if we don’t get to enjoy it ourselves. We certainly would hope that somebody did that for us before, because many of us enjoy things that someone else did not receive the benefits of and we get to profit from. So my approach would be to have a generally gracious attitude.

As of right now, do you have any specific hopes for the new building that you have yet to consider? 

T: Well I’ve told the faculty before that our school doesn’t get any better the day we walk into the new facility, because the quality of a place, whether it is a workplace or a school or church or anything like that, is in the people that go there. So if I take all the people that are here – students, faculty – and I move them into the most beautiful place in Nashville, brand new, and we spent a hundred million dollars on this building– the school didn’t get any better.  

T: I mean it’s nicer looking, but the quality is based on people’s passion, their investment, their dedication, all that ‘Live With PRIDE’ stuff, those things don’t increase right when you walk into a fancy place; the quality lies in the people that are there. So fifty years down the line, what will matter is the quality of the dedication and the passion from the artists that come through. So, as exciting as the new school is, it’s not any better than what we have now. What it will do is draw more people’s interest and we’ll reach someone who lives in Antioch or Bordeaux, somewhere far away as an eighth grader and they’ll be excited about coming to NSA if it’s this gorgeous state of the art place.  

T: That might be a motivator for them. And because of that we can get more kids. Because if we end here with six hundred kids now, and by next fall we have a thousand, it’s going to be really difficult to find all those bodies out there, in fact we might not. But the hope is that we’ll have a lot that are vying to get in.

The building is just a building. It’s stone and wood and pipes. People make places, not accolades.   

With the heightened capacity of the new school, do you have any plans to draw more students in? Or possibly even to recruit? 

T: There will probably be a two year long building process. So during that entire time we’re going to advertise as much as possible and we would hope a year or two before it opens that we have more applicants than ever because they know that if in their freshman year they might not be in the new school, once people figure out that they’re going to graduate in the new school, we need to start building up numbers even before then. What’s difficult right now is that I can’t fit seven hundred, eight hundred students in this building so we’re sort of limited in that perspective. So there’s a disadvantage to recruiting too much too early before the building exists. But for sure that’s one of the number one questions on our mind: “Is the district going to require us to accept more than we ever have before?” Because if the public looks at these schools and they say, “Oh we just supported this multimillion dollar project, but 30% of the building is empty,” there’s a risk of the school system looking irresponsible.

But I’m also cautious of … we don’t want to just take anybody, right?  

This last year we had about an 82% acceptance rate from students that applied. So 82% we accepted and about 18% we said no to. So we’re still taking most everybody, but you can be told ‘no’ to coming here, and I think we’ll find that that 82% number will get even lower because we want things to be competitive. So yes, we’re definitely thinking about recruiting but we don't want to risk overdoing it too early because there’s only so much space in where we live right now. 

With the new building being able to hold more students will the audition process be done differently?  

T: Let’s pretend we ended the school year with six hundred students here and then we said next fall we’re going to the new school, if we know we can take a thousand we might have a goal of four classes with two hundred and fifty students each, we might say in the springtime, “Okay this year our goal is to try to get two hundred and fifty students in the freshman class in seats. And so the first year we might only have seven hundred students. And then next year we might have eight hundred and then next year we might have nine hundred and it may take four full years before we have big classes of two fifty each to get class to that capacity. So I don’t think it would change our [audition] process much but we might have to set some limits on how many we take. But there’s no predicting the future. 

T: If our acceptance rate was 50% right now, that would be great for me. But that would only be possible if we have so many kids knocking down the door to be here of such quality that we have the luxury of still being able to meet our numbers. Because numbers equal jobs. I mean, if we don’t have enough kids to come to school then there’s not enough money to pay for teachers to be here and then we start affecting people’s livelihoods. So there’s sort of this competing interest between having enough numbers but also not accepting so many [students] that you start to degrade the quality by just taking whoever.