Overview / Teaching Artists / Mission, Principles / Results

Mission:
To ensure that by elementary school graduation, every Powerful Schools student is able to create and perform within, and respond to, the major arts disciplines, dance, music, theater, and visual arts, and can use these art forms to draw meaning from their lives and to serve the greater goodness and beauty of the world through their own acts of creativity.

Guiding Principles:

• The arts are essential and basic to a child's education. 
• All children are entitled to early exposure to and practice in the arts.
• The arts appeal to a broad range of diverse learning styles and ensure varied opportunities to excel. 
• A high quality arts literacy program provides meaningful learning experiences that employ creative, disciplined, and analytical problem solving. 
• Collaboration and communication skills, and creative expression can be cultivated in young people, in part, by teaching both about and through the arts.
• Artists are uniquely qualified to teach the arts, and bring complementary skills to collaborations with classroom teachers.
• Bringing the arts into the classroom and relating them to the curriculum emphasizes their relevance, and increases the likelihood that children will make long-lasting connections between principles, values, and skills shared by both.