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EDUCATION: HONOR ROLES
HONOR ROLES
New partnership with schools expands learning opportunities for all at summer camps.
Students practice their curtain call bows as part of a DMPA summer camp.
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Bringing together more diverse experiences, more diverse interpretations, makes for a richer experience for all. That’s the driving force behind a new scholarship program that is changing summer camps at Des Moines
Performing Arts. School-to-Stage Scholarships were introduced in the summer of 2021 for students in both the Musical
Theater Camp and Broadway Summer Intensive sessions. Local teachers were asked to identify students with a special passion and penchant for performing arts to represent their schools. Twentythree scholarships were awarded. “We were seeing fewer students from urban schools at our summer camps, and we set out to understand why,” said Karoline Myers, Director of
Education for DMPA. Working with school leaders helped to identify barriers that students and their families might be facing, from lack of knowledge of the camps, to the cost of tuition, and even access to transportation. The School-to-Stage Scholarship program was built specifically to knock down those barriers and open up opportunities to more students. Since the scholarships are based on merit, they are a point of pride and encouragement for students and their families. And since classmates attend camp together, they can count on finding familiar faces in new surroundings.
Moulton Elementary School in Des Moines was one of the partners in the pilot program, sending five students to one of the week-long Musical Theater Camps in 2021.
“To me, it’s about access to opportunity from two different perspectives,” said Ben Heinen, Associate Principal at Moulton. “The opportunity for our students to participate in performing arts programming that historically would not have been as available for them. Then conversely, students for whom that programming is more readily available now have access to social experiences with a more diverse group, and that informs their perspective on the community and the world around them.”
Several of the schools involved in the new scholarship effort are also members of the Turnaround Arts program, created by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in 2011. The schools use integrated arts education to invigorate the school environment and to increase student engagement and achievement. The arts become a
Opposite page: Campers build upon existing skills and learn new ones with the guidance of theater professionals.
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pathway to possibilities, from creative expression to careers, from scholarships to social change.
“The more opportunity our students have to live that identity in the broader community as opposed to just in the school community alone, the more it reinforces all the positive impacts of increasing access to the arts. That’s why partnerships like this one with Des Moines Performing Arts are so valuable,” said Heinen.
“As they grow and mature, being part of these environments won’t feel special, it will feel natural. That’s where we need to be, where our students deserve to be. It begins with opportunities like this.”
Summer camp participants experience all the moving parts of a live theater production: the auditions, the costumes, the staging, the directing, the teamwork, the anticipation. As a result, they see different roles as possibilities for their own futures. “You can never know what is going to open minds, and hearts, to what is possible,” said Myers.
DMPA hosted six weeks of Musical Theater Camp in 2021, with 35 students each week preparing and performing the out-of-this-world romp Space Pirates. The whirlwind adventure gave each student a chance to grab the spotlight. And what a spotlight it was. After shifting summer camps to a virtual format in 2020, DMPA celebrated the return to in-person participation at the Des Moines Civic Center.
That gave campers plenty of space where they could safely learn from their instructors and from one another. “The students bring different perspectives and experiences to the mix,” said Myers. “They meet on Monday for the first time and by the end of the week are performing side by side. It’s a beautiful representation of how in the arts, there’s a place for every single one of us.”
The end-of-week performances brought family and friends to the Civic Center — some for the first time — to see their students shine. Ben Heinen was there the Friday that his Moulton students took the stage, and he heard their enthusiasm afterward as they bubbled with “I loved it!” and “I can’t wait to do it again!”
But Heinen found even more power in what he saw. “What I took away was less about the words they used to describe their experience and more about the joy and confidence in their body language and facial expressions,” he said. “That confidence will manifest in a lot of different ways going forward.”
Ben Heinen Associate Principal, Moulton Elementary School Des Moines, Iowa
Throughout the summer, campers gain confidence in themselves and their craft as they share the joy of performance with one another.
