School Transformation: Character Through The Arts

What might your school transform into?

Our education system is the voice of young people across the country who believe that all American children should have access to high quality education.  The School Transformation: Character Through The Arts grant was created as a response to the sad reality that the most critical stakeholders in education— students and teachers — do not have a strong voice in school reform efforts. Our focus was to improve K-12 education by engaging and empowering America’s youth in a transformation for better schools by integrating the arts and arts-based strategies into the core elementary and middle school academic curriculum.

The Bernstein Comprehensive School Reform Model, Artful Learning™ and Artful Leadership, encompasses language arts, mathematics, social studies, science, physical education and the arts with professional learning for teacher leadership and student learning.. This combination created an environment for success with all students while supporting at-risk students. Character education also became a key strategy and goal in school transformation.

Who was Involved?

West Hall Middle School and McEver Elementary in Hall County in addition to Centennial Arts Academy in Gainesville City Schools were selected to be a part of the School Transformation: Character Through The Arts grant program. They responded to a request for proposals that demonstrated strong teacher and administrator understanding and a desire to participate in the program with documentation of strong pre-existing related initiatives and resources.

This website provides the following resources :

• cross curricular, arts-integrated units developed for grades K – 8
• videos and written descriptions of arts based strategies
• videos of classroom meetings in elementary and middle school classrooms
• links to additional resources used by teachers in the project