Over the month of June, the Baldwin County Board of Education hosted its first Fine Arts Summer Academy.
“Every day has been a wonderful experience seeing the growth in the students and the pure joy they experience from the arts,” said Jay Wucher, fine arts consultant for the Baldwin County Board of Education.
The Fine Arts Summer Academy was the first summer camp to incorporate dance, visual arts, music classes and musical theatre into a four-week camp. Last year, a dance camp was held over the summer and was a huge success. According to Wucher, due to this success, Superintendent Dr. Noris Price requested that the camp be expanded this year.
“Because of last year’s success, the superintendent asked to expand the camp to a Fine Arts Academy and again, Allied Arts partnered with us to ensure it would happen,” said Wucher.
Fine Arts Summer Academy offered classes related to visual arts, instrumental music, dance and musical theatre. The dance program was offered from kindergarten through eighth grade. All other programs were offered from kindergarten through fifth grade. The middle-school dance classes were hosted at Oak Hill Middle School, while the majority of the other arts classes were hosted at Lakeview Academy.
“It’s impressive for the students to focus on classes for over two hours. It's making a difference physically and mentally on them to delve into these arts and to be so engaged,” said Wucher. “One of the great things from the arts is to develop your higher order thinking skills, particularly being able to process, synthesize and evaluate information. These are the skills they are gaining from participating in these classes.”
In dance classes, students focus on how to build the mind and body by learning about physical health and how to maintain it and learning self-expression through motion. In visual arts, the students are working cooperatively to build communication skills, strengthen their imagination and learn about different artistic forms.
“This Fine Arts Academy is part of the overall Summer Adventure Program in partnership with Communities in Schools, Georgia College and Allied Arts so students had the opportunities to sign up for more than one class,” Wucher explained. “So, when we first saw the enrollments, it said 130, but in actuality, on our best day, we've had 88.”
Through the partnership with Allied Arts, a professional cartoonist also was able to teach a class at Lakeview Academy. Tim Oliphant has been a cartoonist since 1983 and taught for three days inside art teacher Joel Respess’s classroom. According to Wucher, he taught the students about the art process and how art can look so much different in the final product.
“Just listening to the engagement that Tim had back and forth with them and the questions they asked was inspiring,” said Wucher. “The students really get to explore so much more in the visual arts, even in a short session.”
The academy was completely free and paid for by federal funding. The funding allowed students to receive transportation to the schools, two free meals during the day, and have access to the fine arts academy and the other remedial summer programs being hosted during the Summer Adventures Program.
“I think as long as we maintain the funding that we've been getting, we will want to offer the academy every summer,” said Wucher. “Though we may change what is offered at the higher ages because we didn't get quite as much participation at the middle-school level.”
The Fine Arts Summer Academy came to its finale June 30 and debuted many of the dance and musical theatre programs that the students learned at Lakeview Academy on its final day. There are plans, as of now, to host the academy again next year.