When Lindsey Lanson arrived for her first day as director of Bonnabel Magnet High School’s theater department in 2009, she walked into a dingy multipurpose classroom that housed the school’s theater program.
The room and adjoining 100-seat black box theater hadn’t been updated for decades. Ceiling tiles were missing, and a small leak dripped from a corner. The theater seats were so deflated, their cushions appeared to have melted away. While taking her on a tour of the dilapidated facilities, Lanson’s predecessor told her not to worry about producing shows with her students because “you don’t get paid for that.”
None of it dampened her enthusiasm.
“I was so excited,” she said. “Like, ‘Oh my gosh, I can transform this.’”
Since then, Lanson has built Bonnabel’s theater program into a pre-professional one that can rival most colleges, with state-of-the-art sound and lighting equipment and a budget that allows students to purchase high-quality set materials, props and costumes for their spring play each year.
To fund it all, Lanson, whom Bonnabel recently named its Teacher of the Year, spends her summers applying for hundreds of educational grants, emphasizing in her applications the advanced technical and soft skills her students leave her program with, including set construction, sound and light mixing and stage managing.
Lindsey Lanson, gifted and talented theater director and teacher at Alfred Bonnabel Magnet Academy High School, looks up at photos of students displayed on her classroom wall at the school in Kenner on Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2026. (Staff photo by Brett Duke, The Times-Picayune)
National organizations are taking notice. Lanson applied for and was recently announced as one of 50 finalists for a Voya Unsung Heroes Grant. Voya, a financial services company, recognizes teachers across the country using innovative teaching methods to enhance learning. Lanson will receive $2,000 for her program — which she said she’ll use to purchase new stage manager headsets, as well as plywood and hand tools for the set for this year’s play, “The Imaginary Invalid.” She’s also in the running for the $25,000 grand prize.
But her main objective is to show her students at Bonnabel, where more than 80% qualify as economically disadvantaged, that they deserve the same opportunities as their private school peers.
“Why wouldn’t a public school be able to have a private school program?” she said. “If I’m raising the funds and nobody’s worried about footing the bill, I think we should be able to offer this to our students.”
Important skills
Lanson didn’t always want to be a teacher. The LSU graduate and former theater kid initially majored in nursing until a professor urged her to switch majors after seeing her perform in a student production.
After graduating, Lanson was working at a coffee shop when her parents sent her a job opening for a theater teacher at Jefferson Parish’s largest high school, Bonnabel Magnet in Kenner, which accepts more 2,000 students from across the district through an open enrollment process.
For the first several years, Lanson’s program scraped by on a shoestring budget. She and her students held garage sales and worked the concession stand at football games to raise money, but it was never enough to put on the high-quality shows Lanson envisioned.
Frustrated, she asked her principal why the theater program had such a small budget and was told that because the department had stopped putting on shows for years, the $5,000 budgeted each year for theater was reallocated to the football team. If Lanson wanted more, the principal told her, she would have to find the money herself.
Past grant awards are seen on the wall of Lindsey LansonÕs classroom at Alfred Bonnabel Magnet Academy High School in Kenner on Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2026. Lanson is the schoolÕs gifted and talented theater director and teacher. (Staff photo by Brett Duke, The Times-Picayune)
She turned to grant writing. When school lets out every summer, she painstakingly researches different opportunities and crafts personalized pitches for why her program deserves the money. Lanson, who has applied to over a hundred grants in the last decade, said she’s accumulated nearly $300,000.
In addition to purchasing set building equipment, tools, microphones, props and paying for the rights to each show, the money has gone to buying professional stage lights, which cost at least a grand each, and sound mixing equipment, which also runs into the thousands.
Her hard work has made the program accessible: In 17 years, Lanson has never had a student pay for theater fees, costumes or their letterman jackets.
“At the end of the day, this should be an opportunity for them to find themselves,” Lanson said. “It shouldn’t be something they’re worried about whether they can afford.”
A lasting impact
The program, which serves about 50 students each year, is designed to build confidence and leadership skills by putting students in charge of every aspect of a show from start to finish. Its curriculum also includes construction safety and set design, where students create set dioramas for upcoming productions before building them.
Learning how to problem-solve is a big part of the process, Lanson said. She recalled one year when the play her students were putting on required a special effect that would allow the audience to see a character on stage through a wall. Through trial and error, the students stretched a mesh fabric over a hole in the set wall that changes its level of transparency based on how it’s lit. When the stage lights were pointed directly at the fabric, the character would suddenly appear.
Lindsey Lanson, gifted and talented theater director and teacher at Alfred Bonnabel Magnet Academy High School, shows off the stage manager booth at the school in Kenner on Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2026. (Staff photo by Brett Duke, The Times-Picayune)
“It was such a cool effect,” Lanson said. “You could even hear that the audience” was impressed.
When it comes to technical training, the program relies on students learning to operate the same equipment they’d use on a professional set.
“I don’t want lights from the 1970s,” Lanson said. “If a student is going to work on a film location, I want them to be able to say, ‘I’ve worked with that kind of lighting before.’”
Lanson said one of her job’s highlights is seeing her quietest students come to life as they explore different aspects of show production and gain confidence.
Abeiro Apolinar, a senior, considers himself one of those students.
When his older sister urged him to join the program as a sophomore, Apolinar said he spent the first several classes huddled in the corner, worried about drawing attention to himself. But with the help of the welcoming community he found through Lanson’s program, the reserved underclassman slowly began to step out of his comfort zone and ultimately audition for the program’s 2026 ensemble spring show, “You Can’t Take It With You.”
“I got more comfortable to the point where I only wanted to be here, nowhere else,” Apolinar said.
