Ralph Opacic spent six years teaching choral and vocal music at Los Alamitos High School before he decided a classroom wasn’t big enough for what he wanted to build. In 1987, he founded the Orange County School of the Arts (OCSA), a public charter school with a simple premise: talented young performers and visual artists in Southern California deserved a tuition-free place to train at a conservatory level while still finishing a full academic program.
That premise required him to function as both educator and administrator from day one. A year later, he set up the Orange County School of the Arts Foundation, a 501(c)(3) run by a volunteer board of more than 30 business and cultural leaders, to keep the school’s programs funded as it grew. Opacic led both organizations for decades, holding the title of president and executive director at the school and the foundation simultaneously.
Turning OCSA Into a National Model
Under Opacic, OCSA grew from a startup charter school into one of the highest-ranked arts high schools in the country. The U.S. Department of Education and the National Endowment for the Arts cited it as a model arts education program. The school was ranked among the top 3 percent of high schools in California and picked up a string of institutional honors along the way: a No Child Left Behind Blue Ribbon School designation in 2006, California Distinguished School recognition in 2005 and 2009, and Exemplary School Awards from the Arts Schools Network in 2006 and 2010.
Opacic’s own leadership drew separate recognition. The Arts Schools Network gave him its Jeffrey Lawrence Award, the organization’s top honor for an arts administrator. The Orange County Register named him one of the county’s top three executives, and the Orange County Business Journal gave him its Excellence in Entrepreneurship Award in 2007, an unusual label for someone whose product was arts instruction rather than a commercial venture.
A Model Built on Scarcity
Part of what made OCSA work as a business proposition was timing. Public school districts were cutting arts programs during economic downturns, not expanding them. That left families with fewer options and made a tuition-free conservatory track an easy sell, provided the school could keep its funding and facilities ahead of enrollment demand. Opacic ran that balancing act at OCSA for more than three decades before stepping down in 2021.
Advising Other Institutions Through DeVos
After building one institution from scratch, Opacic started helping others do the same. Since 2011, he has worked as a consultant with the DeVos Institute of Arts Management at the Kennedy Center, an organization founded by former Kennedy Center president Michael M. Kaiser to train and support arts managers and their boards. He has also held leadership roles with the Arts Schools Network itself, including terms as secretary, vice president, and president between 2003 and 2011.
A Second Act at Orange County Music & Dance
Opacic’s post-OCSA career did not stay on the sidelines for long. He had already spent a decade on the board of Orange County Music & Dance, an Irvine-based nonprofit founded by Charlie Zhang with backing from executive chair Doug Freeman. When Freeman asked him to step in as chief executive, Opacic took the job.
The organization is now expanding its reach with a program lineup that spans early childhood music and dance classes for children as young as six months, pre-conservatory and conservatory tracks for middle and high school performers, and adult classes. A $5 million endowment supports the commitment that no student will be priced out of its programs. To support that growth, Orange County Music & Dance is set to complete a $10.8 million purchase of a 25,000-square-foot building near its Irvine headquarters, planned as a second campus opening in November after renovations.
What the Expansion Signals for Arts Nonprofits
Opacic has described his role at Orange County Music & Dance as one piece of a three-person leadership group, alongside Zhang’s entrepreneurial background and Freeman’s fundraising and banking experience. His own contribution draws on the same skill set he built at OCSA: turning arts instruction into a structured pathway that can scale, rather than a single flagship program that caps out once it reaches capacity.
For a sector where nonprofit arts organizations often struggle to grow past their founding campus, Opacic’s move from one institution he built over 30 years to a second one in active expansion gives a concrete look at how that transition gets financed and staffed in practice.
