Homewood-Flossmoor High School plans to launch next fall the Media Visual Performing Arts Academy — a new program for students studying the arts.
The program is intended to introduce students to a fine arts program that prepares them for study after high school, said Matthew Holdren, chair of the school’s fine arts department.
During their freshmen and sophomore years, students will create portfolios and auditions, which they will use to apply to the academy at the end of their sophomore year, Holdren said.
He said staff, administration and school board member Jody Scariano have discussed a fine arts program based on an idea former school board member Jeanne McInerney-Lubeck shared with the school’s theatre director J.R Rose about five years ago.
Rose said he and McInerney-Lubeck wanted to come up with something for the fine arts department that would “kick it up a notch.”
“I am absolutely thrilled that this project has come to fruition,” McInerney-Lubeck said from her home in Australia.
“When on the board I recognized H-F’s incredible strengths in the arts at a time when many schools were cutting these programs,” she said. “Having three kids, now in their mid-20s, I observed that they needed job skills that included not only academics but multimedia . . . . The arts teaches discipline and creative, collaborative thinking. It seemed natural that H-F lead the way in innovative programming for our students.”
Holdren, Rose, photography teacher Candi Helsel-Wilk and band director Sarah Whitlock began about two years ago looking for fine arts programs in public high schools that are not magnet or charter schools, Holdren said. He said the group visited schools across the country, including the innovative University of North Carolina School of the Arts where high school and college level students are educated together.
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“We saw the model that they sort of had there, and we talked to a lot of people along the way, and what we came to realize is that we are going to have to do it our own way,” Holdren said. “There is no model out there in the world.”
At the MVP Academy, students will attend a summer school workshop prior to both their junior and senior years. During the school year, juniors will take an “Aesthetics and the Creative Progress” class, which will help students understand the place of the arts in society, among other things, through “observation, discussion and analysis of the arts.”
Seniors will participate in a “Comparative and Collaborative Arts Seminar” in which teams of students studying various art disciplines will create a project based on a social or political question facing the world, Holdren said.
Both will be honors level classes worth one credit.
Holdren said the senior year project, which allows students of several art disciplines to work together, is a key part of the program. He said the team decided a collaborative approach to art would be a main focus of the MVP program after learning on the team’s school visits that art students wanted to work with their friends who were studying different art disciplines.
“The pinnacle of this is a collaborative process and a collaborative project,” Holdren said. “It’s unlike anything we’ve seen in a high school, at least as far as we’ve found…”
Holdren said the program is “way more than adding two classes” to Homewood-Flossmoor’s already complete art curriculum. He said the MVP Academy not only teaches students about maintaining portfolios and preparing auditions, which will be continually tracked to ensure improvement, but the classes are designed to help students quickly take advantage of whatever resources are available to them from the moment they enter college.
Despite the emphasis on a continuing study of arts, Rose said the program is not “limited” to students who are “100 percent sure they are going to major in the arts in college.”
He said any student may apply to the academy because the staff believes the program may open up some new avenues of thinking, help students see themselves as creative people and foster a community of young patrons of the arts.
Rose said for all students, the collaborative projects bring the program “full circle — making it meaningful for real-world application.”
“That’s what we should be doing in school,” Rose said. “Teaching things that are going to be relevant, and artists aren’t exempt from that.”
Ginger Brashinger is a freelance reporter for the Daily Southtown.