My Own Two Hands parade around the Sisters School District Administration building. Students from the elementary, middle and high school participated in the theme, "From Where I Stand."

Oregon Community Foundation — “Studio to School”

In May 2014, Sisters Folk Festival was granted one of 18 “Studio to School” grants in Oregon, through the Fred Fields Fund of the Oregon Community Foundation (OCF) for K-8 Arts Education.

Our goal is to establish a sustainable, innovative, and foundational music and arts education program for students, grade K-8. We want to build teachers’ capacity to integrate arts into core curriculum design and instruction, and utilize the vast resource of talented teaching artists to complement everyday programming.

This past year has been a process in planning and implementation of the first year of a five-year grant.

We have engaged the Sisters School District as a partner and have developed teams at both the elementary and middle schools. This fall, we hired two talented instructors to engage students. Karen Williams has worked closely with the elementary school staff and students to teach fundamentals of visual arts — color, design, line, shape, and form — and help raise the interest and skills of the students. The kids have responded incredibly well. At the middle school, Kit Stafford has worked with teams at the fifth- and sixth-grade levels developing arts integration plans, where both the core academic content and the value of the arts discipline benefit greatly from this collaboration.

As for music education, plans are under way to develop a piano lab at Sisters Middle School and teach a general music class to all fifth-graders. This will complement the work being done with choir, band, and the Americana Project.

It is through this generous grant that we can play a pivotal role in shifting the culture of our schools to place music and arts education as a core value. We thank OCF, the visual artists, musicians and community for playing such an important role in enriching and transforming lives through the arts.