South Side Children’s Festival

A Model of Best Practices

The South Side Children’s Festival is a sustainable arts program dedicated to children and the educational community.  Like the IceHouse Tonight series, the development of this arts in education program has greatly informed and been informed by our list of Best Practices.   Among these practices are: 

• Full use of local artists and arts groups in creating and executing the program

• Artists contracted at professional rates of pay

• Focus on diversity-based programming

• Quality relationship between the local arts community and the schools

• The use of student-created projects to produce public culminations

BACKGROUND

The South Side Children’s Festival is an after-school arts-in-education program designed to build school community through the arts and advance cultural equity in the schools.  The program was developed in 2015 in collaboration with Community Action Committee of the Lehigh Valley and Mock Turtle Marionette Theater of Bethlehem, PA.  Also involved in the original planning were Lehigh University faculty members and The Lehigh Valley Hispanic Center.

Beginning with a modest group of four intercity schools, SSCF has expanded to include eleven schools serving some 6000 teachers, students, and family members.

CURRENT DEVELOPMENTS

Increasingly, the South Side Children’s Festival is providing poetry, theater, dance, and stage direction for middle school programs.  In this, we have shifted our emphasis from leading projects in the middle schools to providing artistic coaching support for existing projects.  Also, in the past two seasons, the South Side Children’s Festival has made a strong commitment to the United Way’s Summer Slide programming.  This year’s summer school program provided valuable enrichment activities in the arts, bringing music, magic, theater, and juggling programs to six elementary schools.  We look forward to developing these and other programs as part of our current collaboration with the Kennedy Center Program and the Bethlehem school district.

FUNDING

This year’s South Side Children’s Festival was supported by grants from a group of funding sources, including our main partner, the Community Action Corporation of Bethlehem.  Support also came through the KNBT Charitable Trust, The Sands, Lehigh Valley Foundation, and Bethlehem Rotary.  Our summer programming was supported by the United Way through the Bethlehem Area School District.  In all, we worked with a budget of some $21,000.   Almost all of our budget went directly to our teaching artists. Minor expenditures were spent on the website, our artist roster brochure. and for video-taping programs. We believe that this effective and efficient use of funds demonstrated by the South Side Children’s Festival is basic to the practice of the sustainable arts.

TEACHING ARTIST ROSTER

• Touchstone Theatre- forty years of service in the schools

• Mock Turtle Marionette Theater- forty years of service in the schools

• Pennsylvania Youth Theatre- forty years of service in the schools

• Dave Fry Music- forty years of service in the schools

• Mark McKenna-Theater- Thirty years of service in the schools

• Moe Jerant Drum Circle- Twenty-five years of experience in the schools

• DanceLink- Ten years of experience at Muhlenberg and Cedar Crest College

• Basement Poets- Four years of service in the schools

• Allentown Public Theatre- ten years of service in the schools

• Matt Wolf Poetry- Bethlehem Area Public Library- ten years of service in the schools

• Cleveland Wall- Poetry- ten years service as a teaching artist

PARTNERSHIPS

The South Side Children’s Festival is a study in community partnerships.  Grounded in a strong relationship with the city and the school district, the program draws on the expertise and influence of a highly experienced teaching artist roster.  And, just as our roster of teaching artists has grown, so too have our connections with school board members, teachers, principals, and administrators. 

Meanwhile, South Side Children’s Festival has established strong ties with both the United Way of the Lehigh Valley and the Kennedy Center program at Zoellner Art Center of Lehigh University.  Partnerships are clearly basic to the program’s  growth as an organization and success in the classroom. 

HOW SOUTH SIDE CHILDREN’S FESTIVAL WORKS

The objective of the South Side Children’s Festival (SSCF) is to employ local teaching artists in the creation of  student-originated performing arts events.   These assembly programs are developed to provide two very important services for the schools and their students.  The first is the use of the performing arts to build school community through rich culminating events.   The second  is to create high-quality opportunities for inclusion and equity for students who need these experiences most. 

Each SSCF program is based on a mini-residency of five school workshops and a pair of culminating performances: a peer group assembly and a community/family assembly program.  Our teaching artists in the elementary schools work out all of the arrangements, artistic and logistical, for each mini-residency program.   For these services they receive $1200 for a completed residency.  On the middle school level , our teaching artists generally play a coaching role, helping teachers enrich established programs with the arts.  For their roles as collaborators, teaching artists receive $125 per session.

 Like most work in the schools, this opportunity to provide experiences in the performing arts free to the schools is based on the SSCF program’s ability to generate quality numbers.  Each workshop includes fifteen to twenty students in disciplines that include poetry, dance, puppetry, music, and theater.  Culminating peer group assemblies reach an average of 150 to 200 students each.  Our family/community programs draw as many as eighty to one hundred parents, siblings, and extended family members. 

Through a combination of quality numbers and the demonstrable value of our program, we have been able to maintain the support of a reliable group of grantors and community partners who make SSCF financially possible.

A LOOK INTO THE FUTURE

We have gone far in the effort to make South Side Children’s Festival a sustainable educational product. In the past year, our ties with the school district, the United Way of the Lehigh Valley, and our artist roster have become increasingly strong. 

Meanwhile, steps are currently being taken on two significant fronts.  The first is our recent decision to create a set of standards for certifying our teaching artists—for example, standards requiring artists to engage in workshops on childhood trauma and cultural awareness.  The second programmatic innovation entails the use of the arts to support a positive interest in future occupations among inner city children.  Our goal here is to establish a greater sense of possibility and encourage work force ambition among our students.