Arts program wraps up at area schools

The last in a series of Building Community Through the Arts conferences will be held from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 13, at Nokomis Regional High School in Newport and from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 15, at Foxcroft Academy in Dover-Foxcroft.

Students will perform a dance or a play that they have created with help from performance artists across the state as a way to discuss violence, harassment, peer pressure and alienation.

Also during the conference, participants will discuss their activity, describe the creative process, and reflect on their community-building experience.

Gathering with Nokomis students will be teen-agers from Central High School in Corinth and Dexter Regional and Old Town high schools.

Foxcroft Academy students will participate with those from Greenville High School, Penquis Valley High School in Milo and Piscataquis Community High School in Guilford.

Sponsored by the Maine Alliance for Arts Education, Acadia Hospital and United Way-Greater Bangor Communities for Children, the second annual event is free and open to the public. Lunch may be purchased.

Students from the other 12 schools in the Penobscot-Piscataquis region participated in conferences last fall.

Teens have said all along that the program helped them learn to respect and understand each other.

But evidence as to exactly how much they benefited has been largely anecdotal, MAAE director Susan Potters said recently.

But now, new data garnered from tests teens volunteered to take before and after the project shows unequivocally that their relationships as well as their appreciation of the arts were enhanced.

Students from the Center for Research and Evaluations at the University of Maine School of Education and Human Development crunched the numbers and came up with some dramatic findings.

The rate of kids who strongly agreed before the project that class members got along very well rose from 15.8 percent to 33.5 percent afterwards.

While the pretest indicated that 33 percent of kids strongly agreed that class members respected each other despite their differences, that figure almost doubled during the post-test evaluation.

Also, the number of kids who strongly agreed that creative dance and theater activities help them understand themselves and relate to each other grew from 37 percent before the project to 76 percent afterwards. Meanwhile, those who previously were undecided about the benefits of creative dance and theater decreased from 72 to 24 percent.

More good news: Students who said they enjoyed participating in creative dance and theater rose from 44 percent in the pretest to 81 percent in the post-test.

While Potters wasn’t surprised at the results, she called it “thrilling to see them in black and white.”

“This was a pretty significant survey,” she said, pointing out that past studies indicated at-risk kids especially benefited from exposure to the arts.

“But I’ve never seen another study with hard numbers about how this kind of community building work affects a cross-section of kids.”

Even as this school year’s art conferences wind down, Potters is considering how to fund next year’s program.

She has applied for a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and hopes businesses and individuals will help sponsor a particular school.

By using Title IV money, which focuses on programs that encourage safe and drug-free environments, schools themselves might be able to contribute, according to Potters.

Besides being “a wonderful, high-quality arts experience,” the project has other benefits, she said.

Teachers are enthusiastic about the program because it enables even the quietest students to feel more comfortable talking in class.

“When kids open up to each other, it makes them easier to teach,” Potters said.