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New Life at Duke Ellington

A new principal and a bevy of theater pros are trying to help the Duke Ellington School of the Arts revive its reputation. First hurdle? An ambitious production of "The Wiz."

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Pullens never expected that he would make his reputation as an educator. A Southern California native, his aspirations have always revolved around the entertainment industry. Since his days spent studying "The Tonight Show" as a small boy, he had been interested in what went on behind the camera. Who wrote Johnny Carson's monologue? That was the job he wanted. His academic pursuits were primarily connected to his passion for the arts. He has undergraduate degrees in communications, theater and English, and he earned master's degrees in education administration and speech communication merely to satisfy his parents' practical concerns about how he would earn a living. Pullens spent more than a decade in the entertainment industry, working as a writer, producer and script editor on stage, film and television projects, including "Hollywood Shuffle," "The Five Heartbeats" and "A Different World." But eventually his desire to spend more time with his wife and three children caused him to consider education as a career.

After working for several years in Southern California, at Compton High School and then at the Los Angeles Arts Academy, Pullens and his family moved to Colorado. There, Pullens served as the creative director at the Denver public schools' elementary arts school, Smith Renaissance School of the Arts, whose curriculum he helped to design. He eventually moved to the prestigious Denver School of the Arts and held simultaneous positions as arts principal and director of academic affairs.

His journey to Washington for his interview had a less than promising start. The airline lost his luggage, and his late arrival precluded a trip to the store to buy a replacement suit. So, dressed in a sports jacket, a T-shirt and jeans with a picture of the late rapper Tupac Shakur on them, Pullens showed up for the daylong interview with the board, PTA members, staff and students. "I said to myself, they will really have to see you for exactly who you are," Pullens recalls. And they did. The students liked the idea of having a head of school who was down with Tupac. And along the way Pullens decided he was down with Duke Ellington as well.

Pullens, his wife, Juanita, and the youngest of their three children, Keana (now a literary media senior at Duke Ellington), arrived in the Washington area in December 2006. From the beginning, Pullens says, he stepped into "internal chaos." "We all wanted the same things," he says. "It's just that we all had different ideas of how to get there." Pullens wanted to return the school to its former position as a top arts facility, despite its deteriorating physical state and what school officials have perennially seen as inadequate support from D.C. Public Schools.

From its beginnings, Duke Ellington was a model for innovative collaboration. The school evolved from a summer program, the Workshops for Careers in the Arts, which was conceived to give students with raw talent and little or no resources instruction in the arts. From the start in the late 1960s, founders Peggy Cooper Cafritz and Mike Malone, who is now deceased, knew that if they had any hope of achieving their goal, they would have to capture the interest of the city's most wealthy and influential people. "There had to be some way for the District to recognize the power of the arts," says Bill Harris, a visual arts teacher who participated in the workshops. So, in an effort to draw attention to these talented teens, Cooper Cafritz and Malone took the students' art to the streets. They went into District neighborhoods, set up stages and performed for the residents. "Street theater began because that was a way to put a face on this program," Harris says. "That's how we got to be known, how we got to be a force."

Cooper Cafritz and Malone continued this vibrant idea when they opened the school in the fall of 1974. Their creativity served not only as a way to attract funding but as a means to recruit future school talent. "We would perform in the 'hood . . . we would literally block off streets," says Jocelyn McClure, president of the Duke Ellington School of the Arts Alumni Association, who graduated from Ellington in 1978. "It gave us the opportunity to take the art to the streets for kids to be able to see," she says. "It was how Duke Ellington made its name."

The growing star power of the school's graduates and former staff members, such as opera singer Denyce Graves and dancer/choreographer Debbie Allen, further burnished Ellington's reputation. Yet frequent changes in leadership at the District administrative level began to pull the school off course. A parade of superintendents "had different ideas about how important the arts should become and how many resources do you give to it," says Harris, who has been at Ellington for 26 years. The school "kind of slowed down from year to year." The heads of school turned over quickly, with little carry-over of ideas. "There hasn't been any unanimity with regard to how we move from point to point," Harris says.

Shortly after his arrival, Pullens realized that "the staff had been through an awful lot." The school's artistic disciplines were used to operating separately, with their own agendas and very little oversight. "I knew my charge was [that] we needed to become one," Pullens says.

Pullens and his new team wasted little time. Last year, they began work on a recording studio, which opened recently and will enable students to produce tapes for auditions for college admissions. In addition, Pullens and the Ellington Fund, the nonprofit arm that raises money to supplement the school, have secured significant funding, much of it from the Magic Johnson Foundation, to begin work on an information media center that is scheduled to open this month. It will include theater and music libraries, a computer lab and listening stations. "They all needed to have progress that they could see," Pullens says.

But "The Wiz" may be his most critical test yet. With a budget of $200,000, Pullens wants to thrust the talent of Duke Ellington's students and staff into the spotlight again, a goal that will require everything the school has to give.

LYNDA GRAVÁTT HAS COME INTO THE THEATER to check on the show's technical progress. A company has been hired to work on the fly rail system, which is the pulley system used to lift and lower the scenery backdrops. Dressed all in black, from her dark sunglasses to her black shoes, she looks about with a slightly disapproving air. She is followed, as usual, by members of her creative team.

"Hey, Lynda!" Ken Johnson, chair of Ellington's theater department and one of the show's producers, calls out. "Are you okay?" His question has a bit of hesitation in it. Johnson says they had a tense phone conversation the night before.