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What’s New in Fine Arts

Published August 19, 2015

The following article was submitted by WCS Fine Arts Specialist Melissa Dufrechou.

The first week of school for 2015-2016 is officially in the books!

After only one week, WCS fine arts programs are well on their way to providing a balance of high quality arts instruction along with engaging and exciting community programming. Here are a few new things you can expect this year.

WCS has three new middle school string programs in the district. Brentwood, Grassland and Heritage Middle schools will be offering classes for violin, viola, cello and bass to approximately 80 students. The addition of a strings teacher at Heritage Middle has opened up opportunities for growth in their thriving choral and guitar programs.

Additionally, Spring Station Middle School has moved a section of their after school choir to part of the regular school day in an effort to raise the quality of the choral programs in the district.

While several schools will be adding new music programs, lots of changes will be taking place in art classes as well. Sunset Middle School will be offering a year-long eighth grade art class for students who wish to take their art skills beyond a nine-week exploratory offering. These students will receive the same level of intensity as their high school counterparts in Visual Art I.

In 2013, WCS introduced a new high school art model in which students could choose to focus on two-dimensional art (drawing, painting, printmaking, etc.) or three-dimensional art (ceramics, sculpture, etc.) after Art I. Two new schools, Fairview and Centennial High, will be joining Brentwood, Independence, Page and Summit high in offering three-dimensional art programs.

Centennial plans to use the three-dimensional program in part to support the wildly popular CAD (Computer Aided Drafting) program. They will take their design skills from CAD and combine it with the artistic skills from art to develop projects that follow the rules of both form and function.

And if that weren’t enough, this fall will be packed with musical and theatre events across the district. Stay tuned to find out when and where each theatrical performance will take place.