By Elda Pineda, Program Director
I’ve always loved that “Back to School” feeling. As a kid, the world felt so alive with possibility whenever September rolled around. Along with unblemished Pink Pearl erasers, the woody scent of freshly sharpened pencils and the unwrinkled splendor of new Pee-Chee folders, there was the anticipation of making new friends, the potential of getting straight A’s, the unbridled hope of taking a good school picture and, maybe, finding a sport I played well. Any sport. Just one.
As an adult, my appreciation for a fresh set of office supplies remains undiminished, but that Back to School feeling has come to represent so much more. A new school year presents a clean slate, the opportunity to reinvent yourself into the person you want to be, and a world when last year’s mistakes and unmet goals are acknowledged, learned from… and then left behind. Back To School is a reboot.
A P.S. ARTS program reboot was the unofficial staff theme this summer. As we planned for the upcoming year – including the first year of our merger with Inside Out Community Arts and year one of serving the entire Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District – we challenged ourselves to focus not who we are today, but who we want to be and more importantly, who our students need us to be, tomorrow and beyond. The consensus was, more than ever, our students deserve the highest quality arts education possible. They deserve excellence.
As an organization, we have defined excellence as maintaining the highest standards in every aspect of the organization, from the office to the classroom. It means striving for the ideal. It means stretching beyond the comfort zone of what’s “good enough” and being unafraid to fail. It means taking our program theme for 2014-2015 to heart and actively “Building Bridges, Breaking Barriers.” And because we’re P.S. ARTS, it means doing all of the above with joy and passion.
Lofty ideals for certain, so we also spent a lot of time working with our staff and faculty to find the practical applications and ground the ideal in reality. For example, for our office staff, it meant reorganizing and shifting roles and investing in infrastructure to support our growth as an organization. For our artists, it was a reaffirmation that the lessons we teach our students extend far beyond the classroom. We dismantled all of our teaching processes and examined everything we do: from curriculum planning, to how we greet students, to how we end each class, and we asked ourselves to be mindful and intentional about each step. We also talked about our relationships with our school partners, our students’ parents, and the neighborhoods they live in and created strategies on how to best engage them and create a sense of community through the arts.
We’re looking forward to sharing stories of our new endeavors. We are so very excited about the direction we’re heading, and we’re grateful for all of you, our supporters, for taking this journey with us. We hope that you, too, might be inspired to take a moment for renewal! (At the very least, buy yourself a new pen and notebook. It always feels good. Promise.)
Happy Back To School Reboot!
