Filling the gap: South Shore Arts' everykid program continues to grow

Pay attention to the news and it seems almost inevitable these days. Whenever a local school district finally decides that it simply can no longer balance the budget and painful cuts need to be made, those cuts almost always seem to target art and music programs first. Whether this is due to the fact that knowledge of the arts rarely figures into standardized testing metrics or that things like music and painting are often seen as leisure-time activities rather than serious academic pursuits, the fact is that arts instruction in the schools is no longer a given for many students.

The steady erosion of school arts programs, in fact, was one of the defining inspirations for the everykid program from South Shore Arts. Launched in 1995 as a single after-school scholarship class for about 30 talented fourth graders, the program of art classes and activities has grown exponentially over the past two decades, serving more than 20,000 area students in the last year alone.

South Shore Arts Director of Marketing and Development Tricia Hernandez credits the partnership aspect of everykid for the program's rapid growth and wide acceptance throughout the area.

"Our everykid art education programs are conducted with private and public school corporations in Lake and Porter counties, parks departments and social service agencies," she explains. "Partnering with schools and youth serving agencies has allowed South Shore Arts to reach many more students by taking our instructors and supplies directly to them." 

In reality, everykid is just a kid-focused version of what South Shore Arts tries to do for all of the residents of Northwest Indiana — expose them to different kinds of art and help them understand how the arts can make a difference in their lives. In other words, there's more value to the arts than just the simple acts of painting and sculpting and making music.

Hernandez says people seem to forget the importance of these types of things when school arts programs go on the fiscal chopping block.

"Education is central to the South Shore Arts mission," she points out. "It has been demonstrated that the arts can stimulate a child's desire to learn, improve problem-solving skills, engage the hard-to-reach child, increase knowledge and acceptance of other cultures, enhance self-esteem and self-discipline and increase test scores even in seemingly unrelated fields like math and science."

True to the wide-ranging nature of everykid, one of the most popular campaigns in recent years has been a series of literacy-based outreach programs for elementary students. The idea is to piggyback art projects and exploration on a book that kids are currently reading and discussing in their classrooms — an arts extension of sorts.

"These programs promote literacy and art very successfully at the same time," Hernandez explains. "A copy of the book is given to teachers in advance to read and discuss. South Shore Arts instructors then come to the classroom for an art lesson related to the book, and each student completes a unique artwork that reflects that child's personal expression. It encourages individuality and guarantees success."

For the past eight years, the mission of filling the arts-instruction gap has also extended into a fruitful partnership between South Shore Arts and the Lake and Porter County Boys and Girls Clubs in the form of 10-week after-school curricula in diverse mixed media areas such as painting, drawing, 3D work, collage and printmaking (a recent popular project in Porter County was a large-scale mural).

Hernandez says this type of extension of everykid is just one more way that South Shore Arts is looking to make sure kids get the arts exposure they need, even if they're getting less of it in school.

"Whether through the literacy programs or the work with the Boys and Girls Clubs, we're just continually looking for new ways to promote the arts and provide artistic opportunities for children," Hernandez says. "Our value to the community continues to grow as we fill a void in arts education due to mandated budget cuts in the schools."