Dillard is available to all of Broward County. The school is a magnet school for Emerging Computer Technology and Performing Arts.
Dillard serves sections of Fort Lauderdale for middle school and sections of Fort Lauderdale and Lauderhill for high school.[3][4]
Dillard has an FCAT school grade of "A" for the 2013–2014 academic year.[5]
Magnet programs
Performing arts
As the first public school for people of African descent in Ft. Lauderdale, Dillard High School incorporated two magnet programs in an effort to integrate and expand the educational horizons of this historic school.[6]
Dillard Center for the Arts (DCA) provides training in dance, music, theater, and visual arts, as well as an academic schedule. Students must demonstrate ability and interest in one of the four artistic areas and exhibit academic potential. Such programs within the music department were keyboard, voice, band, orchestra and commercial music. The chorus, chorale, gospel choir, jazz band and rock band performs in Broward county and the Fort Lauderdale community and their students perform at the local, state, and national levels. Graduates of the magnet program go on to attend some of the top colleges and conservatory programs in the United States, including the Juilliard School of Music, Manhattan School of Music, and Columbia University.
In 2012, The Dillard Center for the Arts Jazz Ensemble had the honor of performing with jazz great Wynton Marsalis as his demonstration band at the Midwest Clinic in December 2012.[8] In both 2011 and 2012 the Jazz Ensemble won the Essentially Ellington competition of Jazz at Lincoln Center.[9] The band, under the direction of director Christopher Dorsey, by 2015 had made its sixth consecutive appearance in the Big BandJazz competition. Placing among the top three in the other three years that the group made it into the finals.[10]
Dillard's first principal was Joseph A. Ely. When the building, now the Old Dillard Museum, was built in 1924 it was an elementary school; by the time he left in 1937, when he moved to Crispus Attacks High School (today a middle school), he had succeeded in expanding Dillard to include high school classes. He was responsible for getting the school name changed in 1930 to honor James H. Dillard, a white philanthropist, educator, and promoter of education for black children. He was replaced by Clarence C. Walker Sr., who was principal until his death in 1942.
Famed saxophonist Julian Cannonball Adderley became the band director at Dillard High School in Fort Lauderdale in 1948, and worked there until 1950.[11]
Dillard High moved to its present, newly built building in 1950.
In 1967, Fort Lauderdale High School met Dillard in the season opener for both teams. This, along with another game in Broward County between Ely and McArthur the same night, was the first meeting between white and black teams. Prior to the game, the FLHS team members held their own practices as the coaches refused to hold practice.[12]
Notable alumni
Academics
Chester Seabury - mathematician, lawyer. Attended Dillard before becoming the first African-American to graduate from a white high school in Florida.
Louis Holmes – Defensive end (2008) San Francisco 49ers, (2009) Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Sacramento Mountain Lions of the United Football League (2009)
