“In the Detroit Public Schools Community District … just 24% of the schools in the district have an art class; 27% have a music class. Only 18% have both,” writes Lori Higgins in Thursday’s (11/30) Detroit Free Press. “Superintendent Nikolai Vitti is determined to change that.… Beginning in the 2018-19 school year, every K-5 school in the district will have either an art or a music class…. In the spring, a district partnership with the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and the Michigan Opera Theatre to create a Cultural Passport program will launch with the goal being exposing students from pre-kindergarten to grade 5 to an exploration of the city’s rich, cultural opportunities…. On the city’s east side … the [Duke Ellington] school has a focus on the fine and performing arts [and] a music classroom where DSO musicians Leslie DeShazor and Ashley Nelson, along with the school’s instrumental teacher Sean Patton, were on a recent day walking a group of intensely focused third-graders through some very difficult notes on the violin…. The school has had a partnership with the DSO for years … but this is the first year for the strings class.”
Posted December 5, 2017
