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