Strategies for Student Success 2014 | Page 41

vides extensive fine arts offerings to students. Increasingly, the district is moving to define arts excellence to include meaningful arts opportunities for as many students as possible, in addition to the national performance awards earned by area schools. Arts program enrollment is on the rise, exceeding 5,000 students in the last school year. All K-5 students receive art and music education taught by content specialists, and all middle school students have arts courses available. The district delivers a wide variety of courses for high school students to choose from when meeting Tennessee fine arts graduation requirements. Taking arts access further, a new program at Ravenwood High aims to correct the lack of arts inclusion for kids with special needs by pairing top band students with special education peers. If successful, the program could become another WCS scale-up success story. The district is also working to find more ways to connect the arts with the rest of the curriculum, said WCS Fine Arts Curriculum Specialist Melissa Dufrechou. Scoping sequences for every content area are currently being built to help drive instruction and find correlations between fine arts and academic standards. For example, social studies standards pertaining to the roaring twenties are connected with the development of jazz in music and abstract art during the Harlem Renaissance. The district is working on professional development to share this work with teachers. For the last two years, WCS has promoted community awareness of arts programming through the WCS Fine Arts Festival, a full-day event showcasing more than 1,000 students in grades K-12. Performances and visual arts displays filled stages and meeting rooms in an enormous ev