California Arts Education Month, recognized each March, is a time to celebrate, promote and advocate for high-quality arts education. The 2025 Golden Bell Award-winning Huntington Beach Academy for the Performing Arts (APA) provides pre-professional training in nine arts disciplines such as costume design, dance, various forms of music, media and theater tech to more than 700 students annually.

By combining academic rigor with industry-based instruction, the magnet program prepares students for futures in the arts with A-G coursework, career technical education (CTE) pathways, portfolios and real-world experience while fostering personal growth and well-being.

“This academy is unique in that it provides multiple avenues for students to explore their interests or to find out they can excel at an area that they never thought possible, such as a dance major exploring costume design and wig making and finding a new exciting path to success, or conversely, finding that they do not like this at all and so they can explore another path,” said Huntington Beach Union High School District (HBUHSD) Board President Bonnie Castrey.

“Arts education helps us all to be in touch with our inner creative self whether it is drawing, painting, designing and making costumes, playing a musical instrument, acting, singing, dancing or designing sets and lighting,” she continued. “Being in touch with our creative self helps with self-expression. The arts also teach us discipline, as development of our skill base takes concentration and focus. This skill translates to all other subjects and teaches time management and future job skills.”

APA Special Programs Administrator Andrea Taylor said she’s witnessed how the program provides students with a sense of belonging and helps support the whole child, regardless of where they go after graduation.

“The arts teach them things like critical thinking, collaborating with others, communication and time management,” Taylor explained. “And I feel like those kids really learn how to problem solve. They learn how to fail and come back from that and learn that failure is OK, and I think that’s probably one of the hardest things to teach kids nowadays.”

The APA is hosted at Huntington Beach High School, and while Taylor said most of the students who participate end up enrolling there, about 30 percent remain at their neighborhood campus for academics and attend afternoon classes at APA, which has an extended bell schedule with classes going until 6 or 7 p.m.

HBUHSD and program leaders are currently looking into how to provide transportation to students located at other schools within the district to ensure any student who wants to participate and meets academic requirements can do so even if they don’t have reliable transportation.

Students must audition for placement in performance-based disciplines and undergo interviews for the more technical ones. Each department has introductory courses for beginners. And because of the time and effort the program demands, students must maintain a 2.5 grade point average to participate.

All the teachers in the program hold CTE credentials on top of their regular teaching credentials, and all pathways offered align to California’s Visual and Performing Arts content standards and the Arts, Media and Entertainment Model Curriculum Standards, according to Taylor.

The district has utilized CTE funds to purchase the sort of lighting and sound equipment that students will use in the industry after graduation, as well as a 3D printer, and program staff have visited math classes throughout the district to explain how what students are learning can be applied to careers such as graphic design.

“I think that what makes this program amazing is that we have a great facility and we have teachers that are professionals in their field,” Taylor said. “Most of them have multiple degrees in their discipline and they’re connected to the outside world because of where we’re located. We have about 20 dance studios that are within probably a 10-mile radius of us that are known nationwide. And we have a very strong creative economy around us with Disneyland and LA, so there are many opportunities for these kids to have real-world experiences and go into those kinds of fields straight from our program.”

While there are many program alumni who’ve gone on to become famous or award-winning powerhouses in their field, there are some who have returned to the academy to pay it forward in the classroom, she noted.

“We’ve had a lot of people retire, and the people that we hire back are our own students — about half of our staff now is alumni,” Taylor said.

In addition to the hard work put in by students and program staff, Taylor credits the HBUHSD school board and district leadership with the program’s sustained success. “I cannot express enough that our success is directly a reflection of support from our district,” she said. “They include us in everything — we have a voice and people know about us and they support whatever we need facility wise, teacher wise, staffing, professional development, getting our teachers to conferences and getting our students and our name out into the community.

“We have meetings once a month where the board members and the superintendent come and we talk about what’s happening,” Taylor continued. “I think we’re a good example that excellence in an arts program can exist in public education and we are successful because of the support that we have and the long-term commitment that our district has given to us.”