The last five years have been particularly challenging for the 400,000 pre-kindergarten through 12th-grade students enrolled in local public schools. The pandemic disrupted their chance to learn classroom behaviors, advance social skills and develop emotional resilience.
The process of leaving traditional classroom spaces and adjusting to virtual home-schooling environments created a set of never-before-seen challenges to academic development across the state, including United Arts of Central Florida’s service area of Lake, Orange, Osceola and Seminole counties.
Kindergarten readiness numbers fell well below the norm, and only in the past year have they nudged past 50 percent statewide. Similarly, third-grade reading rates were up 5 percent in 2024—but the overall rate is still only 55 percent.
Further, chronic absenteeism is prevalent across the region, with one in every three students missing from the classroom more than 10 percent of the time. Complicating matters, mounting economic challenges continue to impede efforts to address these obstacles—particularly within the 200 Title I schools.
So, through discussions with local educational leaders, United Arts identified curriculum needs, gaps in services and ways in which arts-education programming could best uplift students. The result is the innovative United Arts Teaching Artist Residencies Program.
The teaching artists—who’ll spend a full week working with students—were selected from among 14 partnering regional arts organizations. The creators on the roster offer a choice of 23 multidisciplinary arts-related programs that they can implement in classrooms.
This “embedded” approach will allow students to make lasting connections with the materials and the lessons, as well as with the teaching artists themselves.
In addition, educators will have a rare opportunity to help scaffold core curriculum needs and maximize classroom instruction time while simultaneously exposing students to the inherent benefits of the arts. With dedicated funding pools to support this exciting new initiative, our goal is to positively affect the attendance, behavior and cognitive skills of students while simultaneously supporting the classroom instructional time of educators.
We need your help to ensure that this enriching programming can flourish in the future. Right now, the Collaborative Campaign for the Arts is underway—and we’re looking to you, our community, to support the next generation of artists.
Please consider a donation to the United Arts – Arts for All Fund to help the arts thrive in our community for children and adults alike. To donate, visit www.unitedartscfl.org/collaborativecampaign
Jennifer Rae Paxton
Outreach Program Officer
United Arts of Central Florida
