Back to School

As we start our 39th year bringing quality visual art education to children in New York’s City’s most under-resourced neighborhoods, Studio aims to serve more than 30,000 Pre-K-12 students this year across all five boroughs. We are honored to have been asked for the second year to partner with the NYC Department of Education to provide city-wide professional development for prekindergarten educators as part of the Mayor’s Pre-K for All expansion plan.  Also, in the South Bronx Congressional District 15, the highest-poverty district in the nation, we have begun implementing Expanding the Frame, a four-year U.S. DOE AEMDD research grant in four elementary schools serving the city’s lowest performing students. Designed to improve educational outcomes for students through connecting quality visual arts learning with skills and concepts central to Common Core Standards, the project will use technology as a tool for instruction, assessment, and professional development, using best practices developed during our recent five-year Arts Achieve project, also federally-funded, through the US DOE’s Investing in Innovation program.

Expanding the Frame will investigate the impact on fourth and fifth graders of weekly, comprehensive, standards-based visual arts learning when it is integrated with other core curriculum disciplines and addresses Common Core learning standards.  The work will be based on lessons learned from our 2008-2012 Art in Education Model Development and Dissemination grant, Framing Student Success: Connecting Rigorous Visual Arts, Math and Literacy Learning, which demonstrated that continuous, in-depth learning in visual arts can have a positive impact on students’ academic success, particularly in mathematics.

In addition to these special projects, Studio will continue in 2015-16 to provide in-depth visual arts learning to children in over 150 Title I schools, through our Long Term Programs, Residency Programs, Afterschool Programs, and Pre-K/Kindergarten Residencies and Mentoring Programs, while also providing the same services to non-Title I schools through our fee-for-service Residency Programs.