By Deepa Ranganathan, The Providence Journal

Liz Tweedly kisses her daughter Rachel Pontriand in May as she opens her acceptance letter to the new school in Pawtucket that opens tomorrow."I need a letter opener," she says, her voice pitched much higher than usual.

A few months ago, Rachel, 13, dressed in her nicest suit and performed a monologue for a panel of judges. In a few seconds, she'll know if she did well enough to win admission to the city's new public high school for the arts. Her mother fetches the opener, and Rachel tears open the envelope. "Aaah!" she cries, her eyes scanning the page. "You have been accepted -- aaah! I can't talk!"

Her mother smiles. "I'm very proud of you," Liz Tweedly says.

A few hours earlier, Tweedly rushed home during her lunch break and grabbed the just-delivered envelope. Rachel had made her promise not to open it, so she held it up to the light and squinted.

"I read the thing that said, do you need a scholarship. Then I knew," she said. First she cried. Then she rushed back to work -- she's a bank teller in Providence -- and told everyone who would listen:

My daughter's going to be an actress.

Rachel never thought she'd have a shot at studying theater in a conservatory setting. That was a privilege reserved for people who lived in "a nice little town where everyone has everything," she says. Now she can see her future looming ahead of her, big and bright. It all starts tomorrow.

IN MAY, Rachel didn't know how close the Pawtucket School Department's Jacqueline M. Walsh School for the Performing and Visual Arts would come to fading away at the eleventh hour. But a clue soon arrived in her mailbox. That month, all the accepted students received a short, sobering letter from Donna Jeffrey, a music teacher at Shea High School and the art school's project director. "It has come to my attention," the letter read, "that because of fiscal restraints, there is a slight (and I do mean slight) chance the school may not be able to open in September."

The problem was the same one that had haunted Jeffrey all year:
Money. Jeffrey had projected that the school's first year in the Pawtucket Armory on Exchange Street -- rent, salaries, equipment, supplies -- would cost about $1.5 million. But by June, the School Committee was looking at an $8-million deficit. A host of cuts lay ahead. Things looked grim.

It didn't help that Jeffrey's private fundraising efforts ended almost before they began. "People said, 'It's a wonderful idea, but until you're actually producing a program, you can't expect us to give you money.' "

When Jeffrey approached two consultants for advice, they told her not to bother.
"They said until you exist, it's going to be difficult, if not impossible, to raise funds. I figured I was wasting my time."

By June, all the organizers had was $60,000 in state grants and a little more than $1,000 in private donations. It was clear the school's future depended entirely on the School Committee's largesse.

Late that month, the board met to decide how to reduce the School Department's gaping deficit. Anything that wasn't mandatory was on the table, including the arts school. "I was very, very concerned. I felt that a whole two years of work was on the verge of going out the window," Jeffrey said. But the committee decided, with little fanfare, to leave the school in the budget.

"There's this pool of talent that just goes undeveloped every year in Pawtucket, and we [felt] a school like this would benefit so many kids with artistic interests," School Committee Chairman Alan Tenreiro said recently.

The deficit could not be ignored, however. Supt. Hans Dellith left the meeting with a new directive: pare the budget down to skin and bones.

AFTER THE meeting, Jeffrey holed up in an office with Dellith, school business administrator Thomas Conlon, Armory Association director Steve Kumins, and several others.
It was number-crunching time.

"I felt, and other people felt, that if we did not open in September, we would never open. . . . That really motivated all of us to really look and say, 'What can we do without?' " Jeffrey said.

Out came the kiln. Out came the cushioned floor for the dancers. Out came the soundproof music practice room. Out came the principal, replaced by a lower-paid coordinator.

After two days, the school's operating budget was cut by about $1 million, to $560,000. Salaries and benefits would eat up $404,000 of that, and rent another $126,000. That left only $30,000 for supplies and materials -- "a tight budget," said Conlon, in a quiet understatement."The decision was, do we open up lean and mean, or do we close and not open it up at all," said Dellith. "We decided the only way we were ever going to get started was if we started small."

Things weren't as bad as they looked, however. For one thing, Jeffrey had anticipated the school would open with 100 students, many of them requiring expensive musical instruments. Instead, it would start with only 34, with only one instrumentalist -- a clarinet player -- among them. Fewer students meant fewer expenses.

Only about 65 eighth graders submitted applications this year, Jeffrey explained recently. All but a half-dozen were accepted, but some wanted to attend other schools. Others couldn't afford the $15,000 out-of-district tuition.

Jeffrey had hoped that two-fifths of the student body would come from other communities -- bringing tuition money with them -- but only three students will come from outside Pawtucket this year.

Not to worry, the school's organizers say: once the doors open and students are trooping up and down the stairs, the money will follow. Jeffrey expects to raise money for many of the slashed items this year.

"I think we're looking at this sort of as a start-up business," said Conlon. "Once it's demonstrated that it's a viable entity, that it's going to be successful, I believe we'll be able to solicit funds."

A FEW MONTHS after the administrators finished sweating over the budget, the school's freshman class gathered for the sweatiest of orientations.

About 100 parents and children sweltered inside the Armory's vast, airless drill hall, fanning themselves ineffectually with paper napkins. Foreheads glistened and hairstyles wilted in the early-August heat.

One by one, the people who designed the school's arts curriculum bounced up and riffed on a single message:

Nothing about this will be easy.

"I promise you all your expectations of what this is going to be will be blown away," said Tony Estrella, the artistic director of the Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre, pacing back and forth and spilling his words in a torrent. "This is a profoundly difficult craft. You will learn respect for it." Marty Sprague, a dance educator in Providence, warned students about the aching bones and long days ahead.

The school's eight-hour day, two hours longer than the state requires, will be split into two parts. From 8:30 to 1:45, students will take regular academic classes in 45-minute periods: math, social studies, biology, English, Spanish. They'll also have a crossover class where music students can try pottery, for instance, and dance students can study acting.

From 1:45 to 4:30, the students will split into their fields of interest -- music, art, theater, and dance -- and focus solely on the arts. On Fridays, classes will be a little shorter to accommodate 90 minutes of physical education.

After weeks of steady interviewing, the district recently picked five teachers for the academic classes, most of whom will teach two classes and be counted as half-time employees. The School Committee has yet to give the final blessing to most of those choices, Jeffrey said.
The arts teachers will include a working composer who was lured away from the Boston Arts Academy, another public arts high school; an art teacher who heads the foundry department at the Steel Yard, an industrial arts center in Providence; a theater teacher who will double as the school's English teacher; and a dance instructor who is still pending committee approval.

With the exception of the dance teacher, who will likely require an emergency certification, all are certified to teach in Rhode Island. They'll be counted as two-thirds employees.
When it comes to structuring the second half of the day, the arts teachers will be given a wide berth. But they'll rely on a skeletal curriculum that took most of a year to develop, said curriculum coordinator Rosemary Burns, an art teacher at Lincoln High School.

The people who created the curriculum -- all arts educators -- had an unusual challenge. They wanted to give the students advanced coursework, but many of the students didn't have much formal training in the arts. The majority of the freshman class was admitted on sheer potential, Jeffrey said.

"But they obviously have talent or they wouldn't have gotten in," she said. "We didn't just take bodies, believe me."

What the team developed, Burns said, was a first-year program to train the students' bodies, teach them the history of their disciplines, and give them lots of focused time to think about their own and others' work.

For instance, dance students will study ballet, modern dance, jazz, and world dance. But they will also take classes in anatomy, kinesiology, and dance writing and criticism.
"Our goal this year is to initiate them to develop work habits, work ethics, and to develop a sense of community . . . to meet those intense demands of conservatory level work," Burns said.

How will anyone know whether the students are learning what they're supposed to learn?
In the academic subjects, the same way as before: through state assessment tests. The music, art, theater, and dance teachers will assess the students in a variety of ways, some verbal (reflective writing and criticism) and some nonverbal (portfolios, performances, exhibitions). And, just as in any other high school in the state, the students graduating in 2008 or later will be required to show proficiency in at least one area of the arts.
"We're guessing these kids aren't going to have a problem with that," Burns said.

AS OF today, the curriculum is ready. The budget is set. The students are planning their first-day outfits, full of nervous energy.

There's just one problem: the school building isn't done.
Two weeks ago, the Armory was still rumbling with the unholy noise of construction: nail guns, hammers, and whirring industrial fans, topped off with heavy metal blaring from a radio.

Workers in hard hats stood on ladders, smoothing plaster on the walls and doing delicate things to wires overhead. All three floors were a mess of electrical cords, planking, utility tables, and scaffolds.

The 110-year-old building is undergoing a massive, $3.8-million internal renovation to bring it up to code and make it ready for new use. The arts school will lease the third floor and half of the second floor this year, expanding to fill both floors next year. The drill hall is slated for a separate renovation in 2008, and the first floor will eventually become two retail spaces, Kumins said.

No one is expecting that the building will be ready for the students by tomorrow. Even if Shawmut Construction delivers it on time -- and Kumins said that was likely -- it will take several days to deliver a permanent source of electricity, make sure the heating and ventilation systems are properly wired, and get the necessary city inspections.

Kumins said students will be able to move in by Sept. 12, if not before. In the meantime, the arts school will have a modest opening at the city's old Registry building.

"It won't be ideal, by any means, but we'll work with it," Jeffrey said cheerfully. "We'll be temporarily bivouacked. The only thing missing will be the pup tents."

IF THERE'S one thing that will help this school get through its first, lean year, it's the people who are entrusting their children to it. Jeffrey has already tapped a few of them to organize fundraising events.

Once the orientation meeting in the drill hall was over, the students peeled themselves off the chairs but stuck shyly to their families. Few left the room, despite the oppressive heat.
Some parents chatted about carpooling, others about raising money. They were relentlessly positive, full of hope that the school would deliver on its promise.

"You're going to work your butt off, which I like. No TV," said Manny Baptista, nudging his daughter Chantal.

She smiled wide. "There's nothing good to watch anyway, no more," she said.
At the other end of the room, Victor Claudio gestured toward his son.

"My main concern is that he wants to be an artist," he said. "This school here, that's what they do. They make him an artist. It's going to be good for him. I know it."