School District Wins Grant To Incorporate The Arts Into Core Subjects

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The Cherokee County School District and partnering organizations have won a $1.9 million grant for the CCSD - ArtsNow Impact project, which will benefit the Cherokee Academies – Fine Arts Academies initiative.

The district and partners — ArtsNow: Teaching and Learning Across the Curriculum, Savannah College of Art and Design - Atlanta, Georgia Institute of Technology’s Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics and Computing (CEISMC) and James A. Jackson Elementary School in Clayton County — were selected for the prestigious Arts in Education Model Development and Dissemination Grant by the U.S. Department of Education.

“We are ecstatic that the children of Cherokee County will benefit from this extraordinary financial support for innovation in the classroom,” Superintendent of Schools Dr. Frank Petruzielo said. “This grant offers not only significant funding to enhance our Fine Arts Academies through greater professional development opportunities for our teachers, but also will provide important data to aid our school district and school systems across the nation in developing new models for instruction.”

Petruzielo went on to say the district is proud of its staff, particularly Office of Financial Management Director Kenneth Owen and the partners who worked to get the grant, which is “one of the largest single grants awarded in our school district’s history.”

Starting this month, the grant funding will be distributed over four years. The Cherokee County School District will serve as the fiscal agent and will appoint a project director.

The focus of the CCSD - ArtsNow Impact project “is to evaluate how integrating arts into core content areas, which is the strategy used at CCSD’s Fine Arts Academies at Hasty and Oak Grove Elementary Schools, improves overall student academic achievement,” the district added.

ArtsNow, a nationally recognized leader in the field of arts integration, which worked with the district to launch the Fine Arts Academies, will provide high-quality professional learning to teachers, as well as assist the post-secondary partners in the development of lesson plans and activities that integrate arts in science, mathematics and language arts units.

These lessons and activities will then be presented in Hasty and Oak Grove elementary schools in Cherokee and at Jackson Elementary in Clayton County – all of which are high-need Title I schools; and resulting scores on standardized tests and other means will be collected.

The school district said longitudinal academic achievement data will be collected by a third-party evaluator over the course of the four-year grant period from these three schools and a control group of three traditional elementary schools in the two counties; and a correlation will be sought linking arts integration with higher standardized scores.