The Educational Theatre Foundation’s (ETF) Craig Zadan Pathway for Equity in the Arts Grant is designed to help school theatre programs expand access, elevate diverse perspectives, and create meaningful experiences for students and their communities. Through funding, artist support, and community engagement, the grant gives schools the opportunity to use theatre not just as performance, but as a pathway for connection and belonging.
At Topeka High School, that work took shape with Starmites, a production that opened new ways for students to explore identity, creativity, and participation in the theatrical process. ETF chatted with technical director and associate troupe director Amanda Burr about how the production helped expand access for more students and sparked new thinking about what inclusion can look like in a school theatre program.
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A Show That Let Students Build from The Inside Out
For Topeka High, Starmites grew out of student reflection on what the program still needed to become.
Amanda Burr said that reflection happened through both the diversity theatre class and the troupe’s IDEA committee. After the class’s previous production, students identified two priorities for what came next: “The students specifically brought up, we need more students of color and we need more students who aren’t able to participate in the normal production,” Burr said. “So that’s how we came up with how we are going to work with Starmites this year.”
That led them to a show that could hold both inclusion and exploration of character. Burr said Starmites “really kind of set itself up for being this piece where we could focus on identity and really understanding how do you tell someone else’s story, the characters? How do you tell your story?”
It also gave them flexibility. “This one just gave us a lot of freedom to create,” Burr said, noting that it matched students’ skill level, could be done in a 90-minute version, and offered room to incorporate guest artists in meaningful ways. “There was just something that everybody could jump in and learn from.”
Students also connected with the show’s deeper questions around who gets kept out of certain spaces and how characters are portrayed once they’re there. Burr said students “really resonated with the idea of keeping certain groups out of certain spaces and the redeemable characters in the story too,” which opened bigger conversations about portraying characters with more care and complexity. She said that mattered especially when students were thinking about characters whose identities were not their own: “And those characters are limited to being portrayed in very specific ways that can be degrading or demeaning or just are constantly put into a stereotype. How do we move away from that so we can show a wide variety of people under different circumstances, and I felt like this story was able to do that for us.”
Starting With One Simple Question
Once Starmites was in motion, Burr said the next step was to ask what students actually needed in order to participate.
As Topeka High looked for ways to include students who might not otherwise have been part of a traditional after-school show, Burr began with a question for the educators connected to the school’s IIC resource rooms: “What do you need? What are the things that you want to see?”
That question shaped what participation would look like. Instead of one pathway, the team built two: the traditional production of Starmites and a parallel puppet show supported by drama therapists. Each week, students began together before splitting into the path that made the most sense for them. “We normally probably wouldn’t have done two projects that were separate,” Burr said, “but I really wanted to give everybody an opportunity to participate in a meaningful way.”
What began as an adaptation became one of the most meaningful parts of the project. Students on the puppet-show track spent several weeks creating puppets, building characters, recording the script, and performing their work. “They were so excited,” Burr said. “Honestly it was one of the most special experiences and it was something [that] doesn’t have to be a one-time thing.”
Rather than adding inclusion after the fact, Topeka High built it into the shape of the production itself.
Bringing In Artists Who Expanded the Experience
A big part of the Pathway experience at Topeka High came from the artists students got to learn from along the way.
Burr said the school brought in a wide range of teaching artists, including a makeup artist, scenic designer, choreographer, and a facilitator for a Hispanic heritage dance workshop. Together, they gave students more entry points into the work and more ways to imagine what theatre-making could look like.
One of the most distinctive parts of the process was the weekly work with drama therapists, which Burr said added a layer she had not seen in a production before. The sessions helped students work through character and process some of the stress of the show, but they also supported the larger goal of building a more inclusive rehearsal room.
“Students actually had to work through their characters and…deal with some of the stress of the show,” Burr said. “So that was both very therapeutic to help them deal with the social issues, but also the social emotional component of working on an interaction with other students.”
She said those sessions also included early conversations about “how do you work with students who are different people” and were meant to help make sure students did not “infantilize or speak down to or get impatient with some of our students who needed more scaffolding and support, particularly those with disabilities.”
Expanding The Circle
The community piece of Topeka High’s Pathway experience shifted as plans changed, but Burr said that adjustment led them to a more useful question: what does the community need right now?
One gap stood out. Burr said middle school students in the district do not have regular access to theatre, so the team opened Starmites to a matinee performance for them. “We tried to figure out where’s the gap,” she said, and found that “middle school tended to be a pretty big gap right now.” They invited local middle schoolers to attend, and “we had like 80 some middle schoolers come and see the show.”
When district restrictions got in the way of workshops for visiting students, the team adjusted again. Instead, they brought workshops into the building for Topeka High students who had never done a show before. Burr said they invited in the fight choreographer, makeup artist, and drama therapists, and “we had about 25 new students who had never done a show before come in and do these workshops after they saw the show.”
The goal, she said, was to let them “get a taste of what some theater students get to experience when they do a production,” while also giving them “a guest artist that they could model where they could see themselves in.”
What Lasted Beyond the Production
For Burr, that response points to the larger impact of the grant. The puppet show, the guest artists, and the workshops all helped show that access does not have to be treated as a one-time initiative. “We want to normalize this practice,” she said. “I want other teachers in the building and across this district to ask, how can I incorporate all students into my classroom?”
That is what gives Topeka High’s Starmites story its lasting weight. As Burr put it, “I don’t want to ever hear a teacher say, well, this student can’t be in my class because I can’t trust them with X, Y, or Z equipment. Because if I can teach a student how to use power tools and large-scale projects and they can be successful at it, I think we can give them paintbrushes and we can give them cameras and they can do other art too.”