Dance in Schools

Utah: built into the curriculum

• Credit-bearing ballroom from middle through high school
• Dedicated state funding and teacher endorsements
• A statewide and national competitive circuit
• Rooted in decades of community social dance and BYU’s program

New York & New Jersey: the residency model

• Brought in by nonprofits on grants and contracts
• Supplements arts teachers rather than replacing them
• No academic credit or statewide ballroom mandate
• Reaches tens of thousands of students each year

The Dancing Classrooms model

New York’s closest answer to Utah is Dancing Classrooms, founded in 1994 by ballroom champion Pierre Dulaine and his partner Yvonne Marceau. What began as an after-school program for 5th graders grew into the city’s largest dance-education partner, and reached national fame through the 2005 documentary Mad Hot Ballroom.

It runs as a 10-week, 20-session in-school residency — professional teaching artists visiting twice a week — covering merengue, foxtrot, swing, salsa, rumba, tango, waltz, and line dance, and ending in a showcase for families. It isn’t a graded subject; it’s an arts residency a school contracts in or funds through grants.

A strong mandate, a fragmented reality

New Jersey has one of the country’s strongest legal mandates for arts education — the landmark Abbott v. Burke (1997) ruling made the arts a core subject, and every high-schooler must earn arts credits to graduate. Yet no specific ballroom requirement exists, so in practice it arrives through nonprofits like Dance to Learn and residencies at venues such as NJPAC.

The gap is real: fewer than one in five New York City schools has a certified dance teacher on staff, and arts funding is a patchwork of per-pupil allocations, competitive grants, federal Title funds, and PTA fundraising. Nonprofits exist to fill that gap.

How a school can bring ballroom in

For a school or district that wants ballroom, the pathway runs through partners and grants, not a state mandate: an established residency provider, arts-education grant programs, allowable federal funding, and local fundraising can together fund a program. The hardest part is usually not desire or evidence — it’s navigating the funding maze.

That’s exactly where a foundation can help: connecting schools to providers, supporting residencies, and making the case that dance belongs in every child’s education.

Helping dance reach every classroom

We believe a child’s zip code shouldn’t decide whether they ever get to dance. By funding scholarships and programs and connecting schools with great teaching partners, we want to help close the gap — one classroom at a time.