Program Profiles on Youtube

As part of BOSTnet's on-going series of on-line program profiles, KidsArts! was featured. A program that was founded by families almost two decades ago to provide arts education and child care, KidsArts! is currently operating in the recreational area of an historic church in Jamaica Plain. The program has an arts focus, but at the center of this program is building a community of learners and taking care of children. The staff are all artists who are trained to provide educational enrichment and act as teachers. The program takes in children from many schools as well as children who are home schooled. This program is an example of a small scale independent program that fills an important role in the community and may represent the kind of program that appears to have a high level of quality, but that quality may look very different to a more standardized approach. That the program has lasted almost two decades (with one staff member there from the beginning of the program) demonstrates that individual community-based solutions are not necessarily temporary situations depending on a certain group of parents or a limited scope of activities. While KidsArts! may have been created to fill a void left by the cuts in arts funding and programming in the day school so many years ago, the program is no longer about the deficits of formal educational programming. KidsArts! today provides parents of different economics as well as parenting strategies a vibrant learning community for their children. There may be hundreds of similar programs throughout the Commonwealth that do similar work.