Three Impressive Schools
Sorensen Magnet School for the Arts and Humanities
I have had ties to my neighborhood elementary school for four years now, and I really love it. Brief story: the school was facing being closed around five years ago due to various adversities. I live in a pretty nice little town that features a resort, beautiful lake, vibrant downtown, all surrounded by mountains. The parents, teachers, and downtown businesses wanted the school to stay open, and somewhere in there a brilliant plan was formed: create the area's first magnet school, focused on the arts and humanities. The school is about five years into it, and now had a huge waiting list, fantastic academic success, and an amazing community spirit. The teachers and staff are spectacular, the kids are engaged, and the parents are highly involved. The parents organize an elaborate, enjoyable silent/live auction fundraiser each year to pay for the high cost of the arts and humanities program, which gives the kids focused education and exposure to an impressive assortment of opportunities. To name a few: juggling, marimbas, african drums, theater/improv, strings, pottery, technology, vocal music, chess, world culture and sports, and of course, visual arts. Throughout the year the school brings in artists-in-residence to work with the students.
Last year I was invited for a residency, and it was a great experience. Before the residency, I spent a day on Tubbs Hill with the 2nd and 3rd grade classes. We set up four stations on the hill for a full-day educational trip covering conservation, native plants, native animals, and nature drawing. I taught drawing to all four classes, and had a great time. The next week, I worked with twelve 2nd and 3rd grade students, guiding them through creating paintings of three scenes from Tubbs Hill. I took the completed paintings and designed them into a poster, shown below. I also worked with all the kindergarten and first graders, and they each came away with a finished painting of Tubbs Hill. It was a lot of fun, and there are plans in the works for me to teach an after school fine arts program next year, which I am really looking forward to. While I'm at it, here's an extra plug for a great school. They created a video a couple months ago that feature some of the performance teams. Yeah, I'll admit it, my kids are lucky enough to go here too, and they perform in this video.
Interior School
After my experience in the Badlands, I now feel ties to two other pretty great schools. At Interior School I had the privilege of working with all the classes. The kids were great, and the community environment, being such a small school, was wonderful. I have a fondness for smaller schools. I already posted blog entries about my experiences at Interior, but here is the poster I designed featuring the kids' paintings. It will be displayed in the visitor's center at Badlands National Park along with some of the students' paintings and one of my own. While I was in Badlands, I also got to tag along on a hike with the 6-8th grade class. Here are some of the photos the kids took along the way, as well as a group shot that I'm in.
Calhoun School
I wrote previously about my experiences with the students and staff I met from this school in Manhattan. It was a treat to meet them and spend the first week of my residency in their company. I would have really enjoyed having more time together, but from what I saw and heard, this seems to be yet another wonderful school. They created a facebook page around their Badlands experience, which is filled with great photographs and tidbits. I highly recommend a look through. One of the teachers, Gary, is a former Badlands artist-in-residence. There is a link on this site to a video that features the Calhoun kids, other local kids, and the superintendent for Badlands. I got to watch the filming of this video, take after take. The video was used as a promotion by the NPS for National Park week in April.
And a few photos of the group, some including myself, are on Badlands' flikr site: