Scary Little Secret: The Winston School Has a 'Little Shop of Horrors'

The popular three-week program develops student creativity in one particular art form—choosing from visual arts, drama, digital arts or music. Students produce a finished product and integrate their work with artists in other media such as a concert, a performance, or a film premiere.

The Winston School is a college preparatory program for students grade 4 through 12 with learning differences and whose needs are not generally met through traditional school settings. The Winston School teaching provides instruction for the summer program, which is open to students with and without learning differences. 

The summer arts program gives students the opportunity to film a closed-set production to be followed by a live performance. 

During the three-week intensive, students will also:

• Learn history of the specific art discipline as well as its greatest practitioners and its predominant aesthetic standards
• Give and receive feedback with peers and their teachers and learn how to use feedback in advancing their own creative work
• Meet and interact with at least one working professional in the field and explore related career opportunities within the broader field
• Can take one or more field trips
• Interact with students in the other academy classes

The Winston School arts, graphics and multimedia teacher Dan Peragine, who has been teaching at the school for 24 years, initiated the program in 2005. He said he patterned that first summer program after the 48 Hour Film Projects with students participating in a two-week Indie Filmmakers Bootcamp to complete a film project from concept to post production. “In what amounted to 30 hours over those two weeks, the kids wrote a screenplay, assigned characters, selected locations, developed a shoot schedule, created props, and then through post production, finalized a short film for a screening the last day. The production included a marketing campaign complete with movie graphics and posters.”