Cross-posted from The Huffington Post
Michael Kaiser
President, John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
I have written before about the Kennedy Center’s comprehensive arts education program: Any Given Child. This program assesses the arts education opportunities in a given community (offered by schools, arts organizations, community groups and others) and designs a comprehensive kindergarten through eighth grade sequence that utilizes all of these opportunities in a format consistent with the school curriculum in that community. It is a new approach that is affordable and gives each student (any given child) a less haphazard arts education than is available in most communities.
This is a relatively new program. I developed the concept in 2008, with support from the Ford Foundation, and executives from my able Education Department–Darrell Ayers and Barbara Shepherd–took the concept and ran with it. They began implementation in Sacramento, California just two years ago. Since Kevin Johnson, the dynamic mayor of Sacramento, agreed to make his city the first Any Given Child site, six other communities have adopted the program: Springfield, Missouri; Portland, Oregon; Tulsa, Oklahoma; Austin, Texas; Las Vegas, Nevada and Sarasota, Florida.
