NEW OWNERS OF WEST LAFAYETTE DANCE STUDIO DOUBLE DOWN ON INCLUSION, AFFORDABILITY

The thing about Millie Maximo is that she thinks like a mother first — what would she want for her children, what doors could an extracurricular open, how do they find their people — and it turns out that is a surprisingly radical way to run a dance studio.

Earlier this year, Maximo and Heather Fisher took over Turning Pointe Academy in West Lafayette from Alisha Kuckartz, becoming first-time business owners in the process.

Neither woman arrived at this by the conventional route, which is to say neither arrived at it by dancing her way up through the competition circuit, collecting trophies and eventually a lease.

Heather Fisher a dancer and dance teacher whose decade of clinical work with children with autism and Down syndrome runs so close alongside everything she does on the studio floor that the two things are less parallel tracks than a single, braided one.

Maximo is a former educator who spent six years in Honduras, speaks fluent Spanish and returned to Indiana in 2020 carrying a specific and hard-won understanding of what it means to want belonging for your children.

What the two women have built together — in a renovated commercial space that required months of permitting, an architect and a sign-off from the Indiana Department of Homeland Security — is something the American dance industry, for all its vitality, has never been especially good at producing: a studio that treats access not as a charitable impulse layered on top of a business model, but as the business model itself.

This distinction is less obvious than it sounds, and the industry context makes it clearer. IBISWorld research has shown, there are more than 14,300 dance studios operating across the United States as of 2024, generating roughly $5.4 billion in annual revenue, a market that has grown steadily, survived a pandemic and shown no particular signs of contraction.

For families whose children compete — and competition is where serious studios make their reputations, and where serious dancers make theirs — annual costs can begin around $1,500 and routinely climb well past $10,000, according to Second Stage Dance, which surveyed the full scope of competition expenses including entry fees, choreography, costumes and travel. The Aspen Institute’s Project Play initiative, in its 2025 survey of youth sports families, found that average annual spending on a child’s primary sport has risen 46% since 2019, and that a separate LendingTree survey found nearly eight in ten parents have taken on debt to fund their children’s competitive activities.

Meanwhile, as a 2024 review published in the journal Arts Education Policy Review found, access to arts education in the United States continues to be inequitably distributed along lines of income and race, and schools serving low-income communities are significantly less likely to offer dance programs at all. The sorting that results is not a policy. It simply happens, in the registration form and the costume budget and the conversation a parent has quietly with herself before she ever picks up the phone, and then it becomes the water the industry swims in — a given, a condition, something most studios have long since stopped noticing.

Maximo and Heather have noticed. At Turning Pointe, payment plans bring the monthly cost to roughly $51. Costumes are sourced from Weismann, one of the industry’s largest suppliers, and passed to families at near-cost. Recital participation carries no hidden fees.

The studio is, by her account, the lowest-priced in the area, and she says this not as a boast but as a statement of position — one that, in a city where Hispanic residents make up 14.4% of the population, the second-largest demographic group in Lafayette, and where the median household income is $53,716 against a poverty rate of 17.8%, represents less a niche market than a majority of the community that the existing studio landscape has not fully served.

The long way around

Maximo graduated from Ball State University and left for Honduras the same year, where she spent the better part of a decade teaching — fifth and sixth grade, preschool, secondary English — in whatever configuration the school needed at any given moment.

Her husband is Honduran; their three daughters were born there and trained in ballet through the Royal Academy of Dance, the international examining body that has certified dance instruction in more than 80 countries since 1920. When the family relocated to Greater Lafayette in 2020, Maximo went looking for a studio rigorous enough to continue that instruction. She found Turning Pointe. When Heather Fisher asked if she would like to come in as co-owner upon taking over from Kuckartz, Maximo said yes before she had worked out all of what that meant.

“I didn’t know all the details,” she says. “But we’re here now.”

What she brought to the partnership — beyond her teaching credentials, her bilingualism, and a tolerance for institutional complexity acquired over years of navigating Honduran bureaucracy — is something harder to itemize but not hard to recognize: a felt knowledge of what it costs a family, and particularly a girl, to walk into a room and find that the room was not built with her in mind.

She has begun reaching out to the community’s Spanish-speaking community on a small scale, wanting those families to know that the studio can work with them on registration, on language, on cost.

According to Purdue University’s Center for Regional Development, Indiana’s Latino population grew by more than forty percent between 2010 and 2020, reaching an estimated 554,000 statewide. It’s a community that is growing, young and in many cases navigating institutions that were not designed with them in mind.

“Coming into a new country, you want friends, you want to belong. And then there’s a language barrier, everything closes,” Maximo said. “Especially for young girls and teenagers.” The studio, she is careful to say, can work through all of it. “Our arms are wide open.”

Fisher arrived at co-ownership through the children the dance world has most reliably failed to build programs for. Her undergraduate degree is in theater and dance from Purdue University; she subsequently earned a second bachelor’s in child psychology and a master’s in applied behavior analysis, and now operates a full-time ABA company serving children with autism and Down syndrome.

“One of my biggest goals in life was to own a theater for kids with special needs,” Fisher says. “But this is the next step.”

The research she works within supports what she already sees on the floor. Studies note that structured dance movement therapy reduces repetitive behaviors and improves social responsiveness, motor control and emotional wellbeing in children with autism, findings the Arts Education Partnership echoes in its research on after-school arts programs serving low-income students, where participants showed higher self-esteem, stronger social skills and improved focus.

Several of Fisher’s current ABA clients already attend Turning Pointe’s recreational classes.

“I don’t keep them separate,” Fisher said.

A handful have graduated into standard instruction alongside their neurotypical peers, which is, in her view, precisely the outcome worth working toward.

Next year she is launching a dedicated dance team for students with special needs. She is also a competitive softball player and travel softball coach, and she brings that same competitive mentality to the studio floor. “Practice like you play,” she says. It’s a coaching philosophy that shapes everything from how she runs a rehearsal to how she thinks about what a dance studio owes its students.

Turning Pointe Academy has operated in West Lafayette since 2013, most recently at 3000 U.S. 52 before Maximo and Fisher relocated the studio this year to a new space at 3324 Klondike Road. The move meant inheriting a name and a student roster and then building the physical space nearly from scratch. What the two women found when they assumed ownership of the new location was two commercial units, each with a small office and a bathroom.

They needed four dance studios, enough room for the full curriculum they were committed to offering, from ballet and lyrical to tap and pom. The intervening months required an architect, a firewall and approvals from state agencies neither had previously had occasion to contact. “We were thinking we just needed walls,” Maximo said, and laughed.

Families showed up to help. During the final competition weekend of the season, while their daughters performed on a stage somewhere else, fathers were at the studio laying floors. Nobody asked them to be there.

Enrollment now sits between 80 and 90 students, spanning competitive teams and recreational classes, and is growing. An ambassador program moves older students through a formal interview process and into teaching roles, building mentorship and leadership into the weekly schedule. “We want all of our dancers to dream,” Fisher says. “What do they desire, what do they want? Believe it, and then do the hard work to become it.” It is, she added, the same thing she asks of herself.

Community partnerships have assembled themselves quickly around a studio only weeks into its new chapter — holiday shopping alongside families through Lafayette Urban Ministry, where Turning Pointe donated more than $2,500 in gifts; food sorting with Food Finders; a forthcoming volunteer day with Tippy Stars, a baseball program for children with special needs, where students will help kids run the bases and, afterward, bring ice cream.

“You’re not above anyone just because you’re on the dance team,” Fisher says. “We go sort food. We go serve. We teach them that.”

A fundraising partnership with the local Aviators organization keeps service activities cost-neutral for families.

The marketing is still finding its shape. The Spanish-language outreach is early. The special needs dance team is a year away. There is more building to do — there will always be more building to do — and both women seem to understand this not as a problem but as a description of the work itself.

The door is open. Maximo will tell any family that asks. She means it, as she always does, in both languages.