New after-school program designed to lure low-income students to the arts

A creative team of educators, spearheaded by the music director at Johns Island Presbyterian Church, hopes to launch a new extracurricular arts initiative.

The After School Arts Program, now in its organizational stage, is designed to provide learning opportunities to Johns Island’s low-income students who otherwise would have little chance of playing a note or dancing a grand battement.

Public school arts education offers opportunities for students to join orchestras and bands--if they have an instrument to play. The new after-school program will lend donated instruments to students taking private lessons, Eric Johnson said.

Johnson, Johns Island Presbyterian’s music director, hopes the initiative will attract students who want to pursue the arts but can’t afford to do so. Modeled after the much-admired W.O. Smith Nashville (Tenn.) Community Music School, the program will charge 50 cents for a 30-minute lesson with a qualified volunteer.

Anyone who qualifies for the school district’s reduced lunch program is eligible to participate in the program, he said. “We would really like to see arts opportunities made available to all residents of Johns Island.”

On Johns Island, where residents are either “super affluent or extremely impoverished,” the need for an after-school arts program is huge, he said. The Charleston metropolitan area boasts a number of excellent arts instruction programs, but most are out of reach to low-income students, he said.

The new program, now in search of volunteer teachers and donated instruments and supplies, will offer classes in music, dance, drama and the visual arts.

Read more in Sunday's Post and Courier.