NEWS RELEASE
The Maine Alliance for Arts Education and the Maine Department of Education have collaborated to identify nine Maine communities where schools and a range of partnering organizations invest in the imaginative development of children and youth. Funding from the Kennedy Center; the Betterment Fund, the Maine Arts Commission and the Maine Department of Education made the search possible.
The six finalist communities include Arundel, Blue Hill, Camden-Rockport, Deer Isle/Stonington, North Haven and York. The three semi-finalist communities are Brunswick, Denmark, and Portland (Reiche School).
The search for these communities grew out of a statewide census of arts learning and documented that children’s access to education in music, visual art, dance and theater is not equal throughout the state. The census rasied teh question, “where are the communities that even in hard times use their available resources to support the development of young people’s creativity and innovation?”
The process was also fueled by Maine’s participation in The Education Leaders Institute (ELI) an innovative think tank and design process for state leaders supported by the National Endowment for the Arts. Through ELI, the Maine team met with national and other states’ school leaders, legislators, policy makers, educators, consultants, and scholars to envision a healthy education environment founded on powerful arts education programs.
Though an open application and juried selection process, nine communities that vary in size, location, and resources were selected to be honored and to be visited and studied by teams of Maine citizens from all walks of creative work. The purpose of these visits is to:
- Acknowledge a set of Maine communities that value and invest in the creative interests of young people
- Learn about the creative opportunities they offer children and youth
- Find out how these communities sustain and grow these opportunities
- Figure out how more Maine communities could do the same.
One result of this initiative, available to all Maine educators and youth advocates, will be a website that showcases and describes Maine’s top Imagination Intensive Communities. The website will include contact information for dialogue with or visits by other communities for the purpose of creating a network to incubate ideas for future innovations.
The Maine Alliance for Arts Education (MAAE) is a statewide nonprofit that works to strengthen education in all of the arts for all Maine students. For more information on this project and other activities of MAAE, visit http://www.maineartsed.org or email info@maineartsed.org .
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