Hand Middle School Wins Creative Ticket National School of Distinction Award

Hand Middle School is the recipient of one of five Creative Ticket National School of Distinction Awards, presented by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The award recognizes schools that have done an outstanding job of making the arts an essential part of the education of their students. Each winner will receive a cash award to support its arts education program.
Hand has a Strategic Plan for Arts Integration that includes the fundamental belief that the arts are a core academic discipline, that every student in creative and artistic, that the arts empower learning and ownership of student product, and that the arts build and maintain community. As a result, Hand extends a broad offering of arts courses in dance, chorus, drama, band, orchestra, creative writing and video production. While 80 percent of students are enrolled in at least one fine arts class, 100 percent of Hand students receive arts programming through arts integration in other core subjects like science, history, language arts, math and foreign languages.
"As an integral component of our middle school students' daily experience, the arts provide an anchor upon which our students harness their energies, said Principal Marisa Vickers. "Our students flourish within an arts environment that encourages them to discover once-explored talents and interests. We are honored by the Kennedy Center's recognition and are looking forward to our students performing at the Kennedy Center in March."

The other winners were Aspen Community School, a public charter school in Woody Creek Colorado; Fine Arts Interdisciplinary Resource School, a voluntary integration school for grads 4-8 in Crystal, Minnesota; Natomas Charter School Performing and Fine Arts Academy, one of four programs offered through Natomas Charter School in Sacramento, California; and Baton Rouge Magnet High School in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

The awards program is an initiative of the Kennedy Center Alliance for Arts Education Network (KCFAAEN), a coalition of 40 statewide, non-profit organizations that work with the Kennedy Center to ensure that the arts are an integral pat of American education. The winning schools were selected from schools identified by their state Alliance for Arts Education as Creative Ticket Schools of Excellence.

Selection criteria at the national level included:

* a review of the ways in which arts education is an essential component of the school curriculum;
* how the program creates and uses imaginative learning environments for teaching and learning in, through and about the arts;
* how the arts program provides opportunities for parental involvement in education;
* how the program provides opportunities for learning about other cultures through the arts;
* how the program links arts education to community cultural resources.