When the Escambia Children’s Trust’s program committee met this morning, the leaders of the Children’s Theater Company (CTC), Eric Dozier and Mehr Mansuri, tried to explain why they overspent their budget, failed to meet their goal of 200 participants, and ended their program in September instead of February 2024.
They blamed Dixon School of Arts & Science for not letting them use the school. Dozier said CTS had invested $200,000 in the community, and Mansuri said the loss of the partnership with Dixon “devastated every single investment we made in this community for two years.”
Mansuri was also shocked to learn the school year ended in late May. She said, “Yes, we failed getting 200 kids, but do you all know what happens in May in Pensacola? I didn’t. Turns out the school shut down. Every school we called said, ‘Sorry, we’re out, we’re gone, we’re gone.'”
She identified two “extenuating circumstances that no one bargained for that should have and could have disrupted.”
“The first of our two extending circumstances – the time of the award of the ECT contract, which was March and April,” Mansuri said. “So, by that time we had new staff because we couldn’t use the Dixon staff, couldn’t use the Dixon kids, couldn’t use the Dixon facility, couldn’t use the Dixon bus. Every single logistic had to be rethought.”
The other circumstance? “The second was losing a partnership with Dixon, which meant our two-year investment of time, 76 students, highest possible level of delivery, the budget, everything had to be about succeeding.”
Later in the meeting, Dixon officials spoke during the open forum. They said CTC should not have been surprised by Dixon’s grant because Dozier sat on their board when they discussed the proposal in September 2022. He even voted for the Dixon grant proposal and understood the CTC would be separated from Dixon.
They downplayed the school’s relationship with the theater company.
“Our relationship (with CTC) was very minimal to start, and they presented six weeks on a Saturday, six Saturdays. It was meant to be in the summer. It turned out to be in the fall of 2022,” Dixon Principal Kevin Kovas said.
“We had said we’re starting our own program and so we are certainly doing the ECT process on our own, and it was very, very clear to them from the very start they were welcome to continue to use students that had worked with them, but just not our location. So what they had said of us repeatedly was certainly an exaggeration or blatant lies.”