Art can literally teach students who have never been reached before.

“If art is such good medicine downstream from the schools, where the dropouts accumulate like flotsam against the gratings of prisons and probation programs, why not plug in some arts upstream, in the schools themselves?”

Source: “More Art, Better Schools” by Tamim Ansery, June 20, 2001, MSN Encarta.

FACT—Keeping young people in school is not just an educational or social issue, it’s an economic one. In Los Angeles, for example, 85% of all daytime crime is committed by truant youth. The annual cost of truancy to the nation is $228 billion. Later on in the lives of young people, it costs the business community about $30 billion annually to train unskilled employees in reading, writing, and mathematics.

Source: “Educating for the Workplace Through the Arts,” The Getty Foundation, 1998. www.artsednet.getty.edu/ArtsEdNet/Advocacy/Workplace/basic.html.

Success Story—Hasan Davis

Raised in the inner-city, surrounded by gangs and violence, Hasan Davis found his power through theatre and oral communication during his teen years. Overcoming dyslexia and attention deficit disorder (ADD), Hasan went on to college at Berea and completed his law degree at U.K.

Hasan Davis is an actor, storyteller and poet in high demand as a motivational speaker and artist in residence. Hasan has also been appointed by Governor Paul Patton as the Chairperson of the State Advisory Group on Juvenile Justice.

 

I got involved with the juvenile system at about 11 years old, and things began to change for me. My mother challenged me one day to find a way to focus the anger . . . She sat me down and introduced me to writing and said that was the way that I could reclaim my world. I could define who I was outside of what everyone else thought and what everybody else did to interact with me. So, I began writing . . . I started to write about the pain that was around me. The real anger that I had. When I started doing that, I stopped going outside angry.

Hasan Davis