At-Risk Youth Art Programs Come Up Tall

Before First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton walked into the ornate East Room of the White House to present the first annual Coming Up Taller Awards on October 7th, a certain amount of fidgeting and lots of leg swinging could be seen among the young artists and performers on hand. The youths were there to represent 10 award-winning programs that use arts to advance youth development.

The youngsters had come with their program directors from as far as Seattle for the White House honors. As Mrs. Clinton walked into the room, the fidgeting and leg swinging stopped.

“We meet here to celebrate the power of the arts to transport and transform lives,” she said. “These 10 recipients are here to take a bow and come up taller than ever before.”

The award recipients ranged from an internship program that teaches youths multimedia production in Appalachia to a theater program for deaf youths in Boston. And the First Lady made it clear that the Clinton administration believes youth art programs are about more than videos, web pages, paintings and plays.

“Investing in arts and humanities is not a luxury,” she said. “It’s an opportunity to build safer streets” while enriching children’s lives.

The awards’ roots go back to the early 1990s, when studies (such as the Carnegie Corporation’s 1992 report, “A Matter of Time”) showed a big increase in juvenile crime, teen pregnancy and substance abuse between 3 and 8 p.m. Such studies helped to motivate the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities (PCAH) and Americans for the Arts to produce a report in 1996, “Coming Up Taller: Arts and Humanities for Children and Youth at Risk,” which described more than 200 afterschool arts programs. The awards, managed by the PCAH’s Judith Weitz, grew from that project.

Meanwhile, a decade-long study led by Stanford University professor Shirley Brice Heath found that at-risk youth involved in arts programs were more likely to win academic honors, graduate from high school and be involved in their communities.

“Quality after-school and arts programs can make a tremendous difference in children’s lives,” Clinton said.

She was speaking to the converted: on hand to applaud were representatives from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the Department of Education, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), and private arts funders. The First Lady herself then applauded as she handed out awards to the following programs, each of which receives $10,000:

-Appalachian Media Institute, Appalshop, Whitesburg, Ky.
-Arts Apprenticeship Training Program, Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild, Pittsburgh, Pa.
-The Experimental Gallery, The Children’s Museum, Seattle, Wash.
-The 52nd Street Project, New York, N.Y.
-Gallup Performing Arts Academy, Gallup Area Arts Council, Gallup, N. Mex.
-Kaleidoscope Preschool Arts Enrichment Program, Settlement Music School, Philadelphia, Pa.
-Pah! Deaf Youth Theatre, Wheelock Family Theatre, Boston, Mass.
-Street-Level Youth Media, Chicago, Ill.
-Urban smARTS, Department of Arts and Cultural Affairs, City of San Antonio, San Antonio, Tex.
-The YARD (Youth At Risk Dancing), Cleveland School of the Arts, Cleveland, Ohio

Profiled below are four of the ten Coming Up Taller Award winners.

Chicago: Media Training Produces Videos, Web Sites and Jobs

A computer on every school desk, a mouse in every hand: Since the Internet revolution exploded in the mid-1990s, school administrators and policymakers have been chasing this image as the high-tech cure-all for low test scores and job readiness.

But Street-Level Media in Chicago was ahead of the curve. Five years ago, a group of video artists, concerned that the new, tech-based economy would leave low-income kids out in the cold, joined together to give them cutting-edge media training and even jobs.

Open six days a week until 9 p.m., the five Street-Level Media labs scattered around Chicago provide free access for youths from age 10 through their early 20s. Last year, Street-Level served more 1,000 kids.

The average household income of an Internet user was $51,900 last year, according to “The State of the Net: The New Frontier” (1998, McGrawHill). That is why free access is so vital, says StreetLevel Media cofounder Paul Teruel. “Even a dollar can mean a lot to a kid in the inner city,” he says.

But Street-Level Media doesn’t just plunk kids down in front of computers or behind video cameras. Professional media artists instruct the youths in computer art, Web design, video editing and production.

In addition to the far-off promise of high-paying, high-tech jobs, Street-Level Media offers kids the immediate satisfaction of earning while they learn. “We always try to put in an hourly salary or a stipend for the kids,” Teruel says. Last year, Street-Level job programs paid out $70,000 in youth salaries. The program can pay salaries because it is run like a business. “The first year we set up, 90 percent of our income was earned income,” says Teruel.

By partnering with local cultural institutions, Street-Level Media students and artists have produced videos for the MacArthur Foundation and the Illinois Arts Council, and a multimedia installation on body adornment for the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.

Street-Level has also begun to address teacher computer illiteracy by sending its artists into Chicago public and alternative schools to work with teachers to integrate multimedia tools into classrooms. Again, Street-Level was ahead of the curve: a recent national study of nearly 14,000 fourth and eight graders, funded by the Educational Testing Service, found that children’s test scores declined when teachers without advanced computer-instruction training introduced computer learning into the classroom.

Seattle: Turning Young Offenders Into Painters and Writers

When a juvenile offender is released after serving time in Washington, he faces some grim statistics: 80 percent of the juveniles will re-offend. Seventy-five percent have adult family members who are incarcerated or have been — not a good model for a youth wanting to stay out of more trouble. The question for youth workers is how to break this cycle?

Try making the juveniles into museum curators and artists, says the Experimental Gallery in Seattle. A joint partnership between the Children’s Museum and the Juvenile Rehabilitation Administration (JRA), the Experimental Gallery brings professional artists to all six state juvenile facilities to teach kids painting, sculpture, creative writing and video production.

As they begin creating their art, the teens must also work together to develop a theme that it will address when they curate its public exhibit. According to an independent study done by researchers at the University of Washington, the teamwork and creative self-expression the kids learned while preparing their exhibit taught them better behavior models and led to a 75 percent reduction in disruptive incidents among those kids in juvenile facilities.

First and foremost, the kids learn that “they can’t beat up their artistic director if they feel like it,” says Sid Sidorowicz, assistant secretary for the Juvenile Rehabilitation Administration (JRA.)

Unlike many arts programs that address social issues, there is also an easily quantifiable goal for the Gallery: decreasing recidivism. According to the University of Washington study, the recidivism rate of those who completed the Experimental Gallery was 50 percent, as opposed to the 80 percent state average.

Despite these positive numbers and multiple arts awards for the exhibits, Executive Director Susan Warner is not ready to talk about expanding or trying to replicate the six-year-old Experimental Gallery. “I just want to keep this going. I don’t want to take over the world,” she says.

One reason for her concern about keeping it going: the Experimental Gallery has had a difficult time securing private funding. It needs $150,000 a year. It has stayed alive through strong support from the JRA, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) and the Washington State Arts Commission.

“This is an experiment for us to see what works with juvenile offenders,” Sidorowicz says. He knows this program is not a one size fits all, miracle cure. “The problem is we have them [juveniles] a short time— less than a year. And they won’t come back voluntarily!”

Cleveland: Boys Dance Around Trouble
(In Tights, No Less)

When Cleveland School for the Arts (CSA) Principal Earl Cohen asked modern dancer and choreographer Bill Wade to teach for a year in its dance program, Wade was apprehensive.

“I came from this planet called the modern dance world,” he says. “I walked in and told them to change into their tights. And they said, ‘I ain’t got no tights! What you talkin’ about?’ I had a lot to learn.”

Rather than parachuting in to teach for two weeks as he had planned, Wade decided to stick around a little longer. He is now in his ninth year at the public arts magnet school.
Wade realized that the dance program was attracting few boys because the boys thought dance was uncool. So he called his first class “Body Conditioning.” Only after building up the teens’ interest and trust did he ease in the word “dance.”

He is now in his sixth year running the YARD (Youth At Risk Dancing), a dance program and performing arts ensemble he formed for boys in grades six through 12. Classes meet three times a week after school.

The personal statistics of the students at CSA read like those of many inner-city kids: 66 percent live below the poverty line. Nearly all are African-American. Gang violence, drug abuse, family dysfunction and fatherlessness are routine.

“I don’t know how many kids have slipped and called me ‘Dad’ in the studio,” Wade says. “I’m getting used to it by now.”

YARD members help choreograph pieces about their lives, like “Children Without Fathers” and “The War Within Us All,” which is about gang problems. They are now adapting E.T.A. Hoffman’s original “The Urban Nutcracker” to inner-city Cleveland.
In teaching the boys how to dance and choreograph, the YARD provides more than the ‘body conditioning’ originally promised. According to an independent study by researchers at Ohio State University, the teamwork, discipline, commitment and creativity have led to a decline in behavior problems among YARD members. Two psychologists work regularly with the boys. Counseling (alone and with parents) and long-term tutoring are available.

All YARD graduates have gone on to college, professional dance companies or other jobs. But the YARD is no panacea. The current star of the company, Cleotha McJunkins, who is dancing the role of the Prince in the upcoming Nutcracker, recently disappeared for a week without telling Wade where he was. As a lesson in responsibility, another cast member was sent in place of McJunkins to the Coming Up Taller awards in Washington.

Wade hopes other artists will follow his lead. “I think it is replicate-able,” he says of his program. “The bottom line is that if you as an artist want to abandon your own artistic goals and look behind you to help, some amazing things can happen.”

Boston: Deaf Youth Express Themselves Through Theater

Jody Steiner, executive director of PAH! Deaf Youth Theatre, stands in front of a roomful of potential funders from federal agencies such as the Department of Education and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). For the first two minutes she speaks to them without talking, using American Sign Language (ASL). About halfway through, the audience begins shifting in their seats.

“I like to make everyone uncomfortable for a little while,” Steiner finally says aloud, “so that you know how it feels to not be able to communicate.”

Steiner cofounded PAH!, a twice weekly after-school program, five years ago with the Artistic Director of Boston’s Wheelock Theater, Susan Kosoff. They wanted to give deaf teens the chance to express themselves and communicate with others in a shared language, and expose them to the arts. “PAH!” is an ASL word that translates to “Ta Da!” or “Finally! We Did It!”

All PAH! staffers are theater professionals fluent in ASL. Half are deaf. (Steiner is not.) Deaf interns from local colleges provide staff support.

In addition to teaching the fundamentals of theater including lighting, set building, costuming and performing instructors also train the youths in conflict resolution and controlling their behavior.

Students are recruited from schools for the deaf in the Boston area. Each 10-month program includes up to 40 youths. Half of the students have other disabilities, according to PAH!, and 90 percent of the families receive federal aid like Medicaid, public housing subsidies or TANF funds. None of the families speak ASL.

“No one believes me when I say their families don’t speak ASL,” Steiner says. “But families are struggling already, they don’t have time to learn a new language.”

PAH! began as a residency supported by Very Special Arts Massachusetts. The following year, the Wheelock Family Theatre received a $50,000 two-year matching grant through the YouthReach program of the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

Steiner wishes funders would not put such an emphasis on “measurable proof” that PAH! and other arts programs are improving kids’ lives.

“We have four students accepted to the Boston Arts Academy High School,” she says. And many students who came in saying they expected to “go on welfare” when they finish school now say they want to be “actors and nurses, and one girl wants to be a funeral director because [she believes] she’d be the only deaf funeral director in America.”

“But how can we prove to you that what we do changes lives?”

Resources

The Experimental Gallery
Susan Warner, Director
The Children’s Museum, Seattle
305 Harrison St.
Seattle, WA 98109
(206) 441-1768

The YARD
Bill Wade, Director
The Cleveland School for the Arts
2064 Stearns Rd.
Cleveland, OH 44106
(216) 791-2496

Street-Level Youth Media
Paul Teruel, Co-director
1856 W. Chicago
P.O. Box 578336
Chicago, IL 60657
(773) 862-5331
Fax: (773) 862-0754
E-mail: livewire@charlie.acc.iit.edu
Website: www.iit.edu/~livewire/

PAH! Deaf Youth Theatre
Jody Steiner, Director
54 McCarthy Rd.
Newton, MA 02459
(617) 965-2996

Rook, Ayesha. " At-Risk Youth Art Programs Come Up Tall." Youth Today, November 1998, p. 14 - 17.

©2000 Youth Today. Reprinted with permission from Youth Today. All rights reserved.