San Diego Civic Youth Ballet in downtown San Diego's Balboa Park district has served as the park's resident classical ballet school since its founding in 1945. Seventeen faculty members lead more than 60 weekly classes inside the Casa del Prado studios, building technique from first positions at age four through pre-professional repertoire—a performing-arts training pipeline shared with San Diego Junior Theatre on the same El Prado corridor. The school's 501(c)(3) outreach program carries ballet instruction into more than 600 San Diego public-school classrooms each year, and its Ballet for Me! track, launched in 2015, extends classical training to students with disabilities. Four annual productions—a full-length spring ballet, the Spring Showcase, Fairy Tales in the Park, and The Nutcracker—put pre-professional dancers on the Casa del Prado Theatre stage, the same Balboa Park performance row that houses The Old Globe. The Nutcracker run draws thousands of patrons each December and stands as one of San Diego's longest-running youth ballet productions near the San Diego Zoo.