More than 15 years ago, the Green Mountain Festival Series created the Arts-In-Education program with the mission to offer high-quality, diverse and artistic performances to its local community schools.  The goal was to put creative opportunities at the center of the student’s learning experiences.  The Green Mountain Festival Series successfully continues to offer high-quality, artistic experiences to more than a thousand students each year.  The GMFS Arts-In-Education program has grown in leaps and bounds since its beginning offering artist residences, mini-grants for teacher initiatives, workshops for educators, and scholarships as well as district-wide live performances.

The Arts-In-Education program offered one district-wide performance each year.  Last October, the Jeh Kulu Dance and Drum Theater, a West African drumming and dance group, performed traditional music from New Guinea for four schools in the district.  In the Bambara language of Mali, "Jeh Kulu" means "community" and this is exactly what we experienced when the group came into our schools. 

GMFS is teams up with the Weston Playhouse and their ‘Page to Stage’ project.  The elementary schools will be doing what is called the “Early Stages" program which offers the students the opportunity to experience the magic of theatre, as they work with a professional teaching artist to adapt a children's book or story into a performance.  Green Mountain Union High School students participate in the "On Stage" which offers "an intensive playwriting and performing residency and the opportunity to write and perform their own one-act play.”

The mini-grant program is in full swing each year!  A grant of $350 allows teachers to supplement their curriculum by bringing an Artist into their classroom to offer a program that blends Art with their particular learning unit.  Last year 57 teachers at all the local area schools were awarded mini-grants for in-school arts programs.  The Arts and Education committee recently received a generous grant from the Bay Paul Foundation!  The committee will be able to apply these funds to continue the Early Stages partnership with The Weston Playhouse for the 2009-2010 school year.

Green Mountain Festival Series

Arts in Education Committee Members, 2009-2010

Interested in becoming a member of our committee and helping to bring more Artists’ programs to our students?  Please contact any committee member listed above.