Ask any artist at the highest level how they got started and chances are good that you’ll hear a story about a teacher or mentor who helped them open the door to a world of creation. But teaching the arts isn’t just about creating the next generation of practitioners, it’s about creating citizens.

Take a sample educational theater program: a group of students are thrown together to work on a project with a challenging and unchangeable deadline. Forced to work with and rely on their peers, the students play different roles and perform different functions - all of which are required for their project to succeed. At the conclusion of the project they’ll face -together- a public, critical assessment of how well they’ve mastered and presented the subject matter.

It might sound like a Harvard Business School project, but the purpose isn’t just to create talented, collaborators who can succeed in a task oriented world. Theater also presents a chance to imagine a vision of a world different from the one we live in. For students in high school, this is a critical skill to learn at their stage of development. And doing so can help bridge the achievement gap across socio-economic boundaries

Not enough schools in our community have functional or even partial arts programs. Students have a need and theater artists possess a skill set that can help. We think it’s essential to put those two together