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A Spectacular Student Musical Showcase

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“I was floored. I was so proud of him.”
Liretta Krayse, grandmother of Elijah Pretlow

Just about anyone would be floored watching their shy grandson stand up in front of an audience and sing so beautifully. But there’s more to the story than that.

Liretta Krayse and her grandson Elijah Pretlow

Elijah, who lives with his grandmother in Norfolk, is on the autism spectrum and suffers from Crohn’s disease. He’s largely homebound, and Liretta says they’ve struggled to find activities to keep him entertained. She says Elijah, who’s in sixth grade, loved the music classes, which ran this fall at the Portsmouth YMCA. Families of Autistic Children in Tidewater (FACT) has partnered with Arts for Learning’s professional teaching artists for the three-year Arts Adventures residency, funded by the Hampton Roads Community Foundation.

Teaching artist Cindy Aitken

Arts for Learning’s Cindy Aitken led the classes. She’s worked as a teacher for decades using drama, music, and movement to engage students and was honored as A4L’s Teaching Artist of the Year in 2011. This was the first time she worked exclusively with students with autism, and she called their growth during the residency “fantastic.”

“Most students didn’t even want to sing at first. They didn’t recognize that voice is an instrument, or that clapping their hands, tapping their hands on their legs, all are instruments. We did use actual instruments as well, but I taught them that they’re able to create their own music at any time of the day and in any place, really. By the end, we had a soloist, we had all the students singing, we had all the students participating with tambourines. It was just really exciting to see the growth.”

From the early sessions to the time Elijah became that soloist was a gradual process. Like most of the students in the program, he was quite shy initially and didn’t talk much. But one day, Cindy mentioned what a smooth voice he had when he spoke and said she’d love to hear him sing.

“And he said, ‘Oh no, no. I don’t sing.’  And his grandmother said, ‘Well, you sing around the house,’ and he said, ‘I don’t sing around other people.’

Cindy had a clever response that made sense to Elijah.

“‘I said, that’s okay. I’m not really a person. I’m just a teacher, that doesn’t really count, right?’ And he goes, ‘Well, that’s kind of true.’ And I said, ‘I’m kind of like your grandmother.’ ‘Well, that’s kind of true.’ ‘And I said, repeat a line for me.’ So I sang something like, ‘hey, hey, how are you?’ Something not intimidating. And he turned around and sang, ‘Hey, hey, how are you?’ And I said, ‘Oh my golly, you really have a voice.’”

At that point, Cindy told Elijah she’d like to work with him on his voice whenever he felt comfortable. Sometimes he’d want to, and other times he wouldn’t. “I just didn’t ever push. It was completely up to him,” Cindy says.

Around the halfway point of the residency, when Cindy walked into the gym where classes were held, Elijah jumped up and sang, “Hi, Miss Cindy!”

“There was something very opera-like the way he sung it. And I said, ‘Oh my golly, Elijah, that was fantastic. You have such an opera voice—I can’t believe it.’ And he started laughing and smiling, and the way he did it, it sounded like Ave Maria, like that kind of smooth flow to it.”

From there, Cindy gave Elijah an arrangement of Ave Maria to practice at home. She became concerned when he missed class for several weeks and discovered his family was having transportation issues. She picked up Elijah and his grandmother to take them to class, and while riding in the car, he was “singing up a storm.”

“That was the catalyst that helped him feel comfortable singing in front of his peers. And then once he practiced singing in front of his peers, he felt comfortable singing in front of others.”

The evening of the showcase, his grandmother wasn’t sure he’d go through with it.

“When the program began, he was like, ‘No way. I’m not getting out there,’” Liretta says. “And then, bam, he’s singing! It was so loud and clear, and he sang some of the other songs, too. I was just so proud of him.”

Elijah Pretlow wasn’t the only student who made his family members proud that evening. In fact, there was another Elijah who participated in the residency too and made his family proud at the showcase event, as did all the other students who “performed and informed” what they had learned over the course of the twelve weeks.

“That showcase was completely written and performed by them… it was all student driven, which I really loved,” Cindy says. “It was wonderful!”

The Arts Adventure residency is completely free for participating students. Scheduled for the fall of 2023, the third year of the Arts Adventures residency will focus on visual art. It will again be open to middle and high school students with autism, as they explore different types of visual art, practice new life skills, and learn with their peers in a supportive environment. We look forward to another wonderful year in our partnership with FACT!

The Arts, Education, and Society: An Interview with Drew Lusher, A4L’s New Artist and Programming Manager

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You have a music background, right? When did your engagement with music begin?

In high school, Drew played the lead in the school’s production of South Pacific.

I was fortunate to grow up in an environment surrounded by music. My mother had a vast record collection, my favorite of which was an album of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos – I loved the blasting of the baroque horns through the stereo.

But in terms of making music, that really began in the fourth grade – the year I started playing trombone and singing in the school chorus and the year my grandparents first brought me to a concert by our local symphony orchestra (The Syracuse Symphony). I was immediately enamored with the soundscape of the live orchestra and the energy of the conductor. From then I was asking for CDs of Beethoven and Mahler (while my friends wanted CDs of Eminem and Britney Spears).

Of course, I was also fortunate to have amazing music educators who fostered my relationship with the arts.

Drew with his high school chorus teacher, who remains an important mentor.

So there really wasn’t a singular experience that sparked my relationship with music, I was blessed with an environment that fostered those early experiences.

You grew up surrounded by opportunities to study and perform. How did that connect to your later experiences?

By the time I graduated high school, I understood that participation in the arts was a collective activity. I was fully aware of the ability for these opportunities to bring people together. I realized that shared experiences build community. That was powerful for a young person, shifting my understanding of that cliché on how music transforms the world.  Well, the pitches and rhythm don’t actually change the world, it’s the ability of music and musical experiences to bring people together, unifying diverse individuals and perspectives into a single experience that helps change the world. That’s powerful and that’s what’s driven me since.

Singing with the Westminster Choir at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina.

After high school you then went to college – how did those experiences change your understanding of the ability of music to bring people together?

My time at Westminster Choir College provided me with the framework for better understanding the ways that music brings people together. While there I had amazing opportunities – recording Grammy nominated albums, performing in the Spoleto Festival every May, singing with Celine Dion and Andrea Bocelli in Central Park, and performing with the world’s greatest orchestras and conductors at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center.

But it was the work with my education professors – one, in particular – that gave me the language and a critical understanding of society, economic and symbolic capital, and education. I specifically remember sitting on stage at Carnegie Hall during a performance with Gustavo Dudamel and I stared out at the audience, who were all dressed in tuxedos and had probably gone to fancy dinners before paying several hundred dollars per ticket. It occurred to me that there’s more to music than this elite, gilded hall. That’s when I really became animated about teaching.

After graduating from college, you taught for two years as the choir director at Grafton High School in York County. How was that experience for you?

Conducting his advanced choir class at Grafton High School.

When I began teaching it was important to me to not only emphasize the technical aspects of music-making, but also the emotional, the ways in which making music together could transform perspectives and inform experiences. That transformation goes both ways – for the teacher, as well. I was fortunate to have a group of African American male students who transformed my views of the social role of education.

They’re the ones who really got me looking at the connection between education and society. They were the ones who opened my eyes about the systemic disadvantages that come with being a member of a marginalized community.

I’m forever grateful to them for being open and honest with me about their experiences because it really solidified the importance of education in society. So, it’s kind of been like a triangle for me, trying to incorporate the arts, education, society and how those pieces fit together and the power therein of when they do fit together.

You say that your “whole focus changed” after you left York County and went to Germany to further your studies and see more of the world. Why is that? (Drew received a master’s degree in conducting from the Hanns Eisler Hochschule für Musik in Berlin.)

In Germany, they emphasize music as something very sacred; it’s quasi-religious. So, the expectation is that we are there to serve the music as though it were a deity itself, and I fundamentally disagree with that. I think that music and the arts are there to serve us and they’re a means of connecting with real living human beings today, and so my time in Germany was a transitional period. I came back to the United States with this renewed purpose but also wanting to ask more questions and deeper questions.

Conducting for a German Radio national broadcast in 2018.

I can pinpoint the exact weekend when I decided to give up any dream of being a conductor or a fully devoted professional musician. I was invited to conduct in the south of Germany, in a town called Marktoberdorf – famous for its choir competition. I was staying in this old monastery that has been converted to a music center and there was this choir from Argentina that I was conducting. It was a great experience, but I brought with me a book by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, and I was just so enraptured by his ideas on knowledge and society that I realized, as I was sitting in this modernized monastic cell, that my heart was in a different place.

I just wanted to sit and read and enjoy the sunshine coming into my window. It was springtime and I could smell the freshness of the earth outside and I was more focused on that and the ideas of the book than on actually conducting the ensemble.

I just knew that I was closing a door and I was doing that intentionally, shifting to something else.

Is that when you returned to Virginia?

Yes, I finished my master’s degree and the work that I was involved with in Germany before returning to Virginia. I became the vocal music teacher at Old Donation School in Virginia Beach and enrolled in a master’s degree program at UVA, studying Educational Psychology. The work I was doing in the classroom reflected the themes I was exploring in my studies.

At the Jefferson Memorial.

At this time I also became a researcher for the university’s Institute of Democracy, tasked with compiling data on the national landscape of democracy centers at institutions of higher education. I began to reflect on the idea of democracy, particularly what democracy means for different people and how communities of different experiences and perspectives engage with democracy. This matched exactly what I did every day as a chorus teacher – it was my responsibility to facilitate dialogue and engagement among all of the students, ensuring that each student contributed their voice to our collective mission.

When conducting an ensemble, there are layers of interpretation – there’s the interpretation I create myself, the interpretation the collective ensemble creates, and the interpretation that individuals bring based on their own life. The beauty of the music experience comes from negotiating those interpretations so that our performance represents what we want to communicate both as individuals and as a collective. That is what democracy is, the negotiating between individual and collective identities to ensure authentic representation.

So what prompted you to leave teaching and join Arts for Learning?

I’ve begun to think more broadly about arts engagement. While I loved teaching and loved the students, I would like to utilize my ideas and my experiences to help foster collaboration between organizations and communities to ensure that everyone has an opportunity to contribute their voice and reflect on their perspectives and the perspectives of others through high-quality arts engagement.

As I’ve been investigating the social sphere and the social role of the arts, it’s clear that students are sometimes not presented opportunities in an equal way. And so, it’s up to organizations – like Arts for Learning – to fill those gaps for disadvantaged and marginalized communities where the arts are a powerful means of helping students achieve but also to feel represented and to represent themselves.

What are your goals with Arts for Learning?

In working with the existing artists on our roster, in recruiting new artists, and in developing programming, I want to make sure Arts for Learning is engaging students in ways that are appropriate for 21st century learners. The experiences we offer students should be 21st century experiences—so thinking about what is relevant to our students today, what is relevant about technology in terms of the way we consume the arts, and what are the relevant values we-as-a-society want to promote.

If you’re thinking about only using music and musical experiences to prepare kids to sit quietly at the symphony, that’s doing a disservice to the power of the arts today and the ways that the arts can connect, educate, and inspire today’s young students. Students are willing to be engaged and willing to create, but they want experiences that authentically engage and authentically reflect them.

(An active member of the community, Drew sings in the Virginia Chorale and works as the staff bass at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church and at Ohef Sholom Temple. Drew lives with his partner, Kevin, in Norfolk.)

Discussing music with the conductor of the Virginia Chorale, Chuck Woodward.

I’ve got to ask – you grew up in Syracuse, went to college in New Jersey, and then lived in Germany – why settle in Virginia?

Well, in the fifth grade I had to do a presentation on Thomas Jefferson. Through my research for that project, I developed this idyllic, picturesque idea of Virginia, this view of rolling hills and Colonial Williamsburg and Monticello, and so I’ve just had this fascination since then. I feel a lot of pride when I tell people I live in Virginia. It feels like an accomplishment of mine, which seems kind of silly, but I love it. In three hours, I can be in D.C., in two hours I can be at Jefferson’s Monticello, in twenty minutes I can be at the beach, and every day I hear the fighter jets and see the aircraft carriers – what’s not love? I feel like I’ve come home.

A hobby of Drew’s is collecting and reading biographies of complex historical characters. Last year he started reading a biography of every U.S. president chronologically and is currently up to Jimmy Carter. Sourcing books is part of the fun–Drew had to look all over stores in Washington, D.C. just to find a biography of Rutherford B. Hayes!

Arts for Learning Awarded Major Grant To Use Art to Build Community Among Students Affected by the Pandemic

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Arts for Learning (A4L) is pleased to announce it has received the largest grant in its organization’s 68-year history. Over the next three years, the $97,500 Cultural Vitality grant from the Hampton Roads Community Foundation will fund a series of arts-integrated afterschool programs at high-need schools in south Hampton Roads, guided by Arts for Learning’s professional teaching artists.

The project is named IDEAL, Intentional Designs of Expression in Artistic Languages, and will target fifth-grade students in the critical year before they transition to middle school. During the course of each ten-week residency, students will create multiple mixed media works of art as they explore various aspects of self-identity through dance, written and spoken poetry, and visual art. Approximately 270 students from nine different elementary schools are expected to participate, drawn from the Norfolk, Portsmouth, and Suffolk Public School divisions, with one school per division taking part each year. Students will have the opportunity to collaborate with students from outside of their own schools and see how they and others impact and fit into the wider Hampton Roads’ community.

Meeting twice a week in 90-minute sessions, the students in each school’s residency will be led by Arts for Learning’s teaching artists who are experts in their particular art forms. A4L’s education and program team developed the curriculum, which is tied to various Virginia Standards of Learning, including visual arts, dance, English, and social-emotional learning. The program’s highlight each year will be a collaborative art exhibit of student work from all three schools, hosted by the Chrysler Museum. 

“To bring students to the museum and show them it’s their place to have a voice is just an amazing opportunity,” said Anna Green, chief operations officer for Arts for Learning. “It may inspire them to go on and create art or find their voice in writing or in other ways, and they’ll also learn how to build pieces of community within where they live, outside of where they live, and then bring it all together into one. There will be 270 students that will see their work professionally hung in a professional museum. I can’t even bring words to how important that is, to make the museum accessible and for students to feel like they’re a part of a larger community.”

In addition to helping students develop creative and artistic talents, the IDEAL project is designed to increase students’ self-worth, while improving their academic performance and decreasing absenteeism and problem behaviors. For students entering adolescence, the year before middle school is a crossroads, as they are faced with choices that impact their future selves academically, socially, and physically. Decades of research connects positive self-worth with a reduction in risky behaviors. With studies showing the pandemic’s devastating toll on students—along with a disturbing rise in crime—the need is great to provide effective interventions that boost the self-worth of at-risk students at a critical life stage.

“We’re looking to reach the students who are struggling, to give them that hands-on opportunity to discover their voice through the arts and to broaden their view of community,” Green said. She pointed out that the fifth-graders who will participate in the first year of the project entered the pandemic as second-graders, missing out on the key socialization and building of community that typically happens during third and fourth grades.

Collaboration is a central feature of the IDEAL project: among student peers within the same school and other schools, and among Arts for Learning and its community partners—the Norfolk, Portsmouth, and Suffolk school divisions, the Chrysler Museum, and the Richmond Ballet. Partnering with the Richmond Ballet and the Chrysler will deepen each student’s artistic experience.

The Richmond Ballet will present a series of in-school performances for third to fifth graders enrolled at each school, reaching a larger community of students beyond those participating in the residencies.

The Chrysler will present a virtual gallery talk on art works that exemplify human expression, examining elements such as color, line, shape, and composition that students can use to inspire their own sketches. In addition, by hosting exhibits each year of student artwork created during the project, the Chrysler will bring together students from all of the schools, along with their families. Students will be transported to and from the event by bus at no cost, so that each has the opportunity to attend.

The IDEAL project is the largest and most ambitious in Arts for Learning’s history,” said Christine Everly, A4L’s chief executive officer. “We’re excited to partner with two other respected arts organizations and three of our school divisions in Hampton Roads.  And we’re proud and humbled that the Hampton Roads Community Foundation has placed its trust in us by funding this project.”

No student will be charged a fee to participate in the IDEAL program. The first three residencies are expected to launch in the spring of 2023.

A Program that Makes a Real Impact

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A Churchland student named Legend gets fitted for a violin during his first lesson.

After two years of being shut down because of the pandemic, Strings Impact is up and running again in Portsmouth Public Schools!

We’re celebrating a successful kickoff of this long-running residency that introduces fourth, fifth, and sixth graders to playing the violin, with instruments provided by the schools.

The program is taking place after-school at Churchland, Lakeview, and Simonsdale Elementary Schools, with students taking one 90-minute lesson a week for twelve weeks. At the end of the residency, each set of students will show off what they’ve learned in a special concert for family and friends.

Tina Culver, a fulltime music teacher at Churchland Elementary School, is the A4L teaching artist for the Churchland Strings Impact residency. Although she didn’t grow up in Portsmouth, she says the opportunity to learn the violin changed the course of her life.

“I had such a wonderful experience from the moment I started playing the violin in the fifth grade—I just hit the ground running, and I was involved in all different kinds of music programs within my community, orchestras, went on to the governor’s school, then went on to college and eventually took that up as a major.

If there hadn’t had been programs like this available for me,  my childhood would have been so much different.”

That’s why Tina feels so strongly about programs like this that expose underserved students to quality arts education. “For Portsmouth, I feel it’s important to be a part of the program because a lot of those kids are not normally getting access to classical music or to string instruments,” she says. And by having her as a teacher, students “see someone who looks like themselves, someone who’s young, someone who’s positive and energetic, and someone who tries to make it fun and interesting.”

John Jenkins is the teaching artist for the Lakeview and Simonsdale Elementary residencies. He works as a band teacher at Manor High School in Portsmouth. Altogether, 52 students are participating in the three residencies, with a waiting list of 14 students at Churchland. The enthusiasm is high among all the students—one girl writes that she may want to be a professional violinist when she grows up!

Strings Impact began about 17 years ago after starting at Westhaven Elementary School in Portsmouth. It has rotated among different schools since then.

We want to thank the E.C. Wareheim Foundation and Portsmouth Public Schools for underwriting the Strings Impact program!

Simonsdale Elementary School principal Tammy King attends the first session of the residency.

Do you want to support arts education for students who may not otherwise experience it? You can make your tax-deductible gift by clicking here.

Rhythm and Me: An Adaptive Dance Residency

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After twelve weeks filled with growth and exploration, students in a Rhythm and Me residency in Virginia Beach shared what they learned in a special performance for family and friends, choreographing the presentation by themselves. The adaptive dance program is a partnership between Arts for Learning and Families of Autistic Children in Tidewater (FACT). The residency was designed for students to join with their peers and learn new skills in a supportive environment.

Starting in September, the students met twice a week with A4L teaching artist Angela Taylor, a certified yoga instructor. In each class, she led students in a particular dance style—ballet, hip hop, jazz, party dances and more—with each dance paired with discussion about a different life skill. The curriculum was specially formulated for middle and high school students with autism.

“We were looking at the social emotional aspects of learning, of togetherness, community, social justice, understanding each other, and being okay with who we are in our bodies,” Angela says. As the program progressed, she witnessed growth in students from week to week. One student, for example, had difficulty speaking and let her aide speak for her, but by week three, Angela saw that the girl had become confident enough to communicate by herself. “That was truly amazing to watch her grow.”

“Overall, I think that a lot of them came out of their shells and they’re just free with their dancing, free with their movements. Even some of the parents would say, ‘Oh, my child can’t do ballet.’ And I’ve always said that it’s not about the dancing. It’s about coming together and creating a community and enjoying life and having a great time. I don’t mind if the moves aren’t perfect because I’m not perfect. I just want everybody to have a good time and have a positive experience in the class, and I feel like we accomplished that.”

Parents provided overwhelmingly positive feedback about the residency. But Kara Rothman, mother to 13-year-old Jesse Elia, says she didn’t initially have high hopes for the program.

“We’ve signed up  and paid for so many things that I’ve had to drag him to, but he wants to go to [Rhythm and Me], which is the first time ever. For me, it was huge because I’ve taken him to so many different places where I have to preface who we are and his quirks, and [at Rhythm and Me] he’s allowed to be quirky. It’s okay. In other places he has to be quiet or follow directions—it’s very structured—and he was always getting kicked out of stuff. Nothing ever worked, ever. Every time I’m just so grateful that he wants to be there.”

Jesse calls the program “fun, interactive, and entertaining,” and says he especially likes being with other students on the spectrum. He also says he finds the yoga portion “calming,” and the program less stressful than others.

“If I say I don’t want to do something, it’s not like I have to do it,” he says. “But I usually like doing the stuff, and it’s fun.”

Angela says her approach as a teaching artist is to “honor each person for who they are and where they stand in this world. And I think so many people pressure children like, you have to do it, you have to do it. With Jesse, I always gave him the option. I would say, ‘Would you like to join in?’ And if he said no, we just kind of moved on because I think it’s so important to be honored by your choices.”

Jesse is an only child who is homeschooled. His mother says the socialization portion of Arts Adventures was “huge.” After his first time going to the program, Jesse told his mom he had “gone in expecting the worst, but I ended up getting the best.” As for Kara’s reaction when Jesse said that:

I cannot tell you what those simple words meant to me. Well, yes, I can. It meant the world!”

Another parent, Lori Beatty, says her 13-year-old daughter, Calli Laundre, always became excited when she heard she was going to dance class.

“When I pick her up, she’s full of energy. If we get there early, she grabs her mat and she’s just ready to go. I think the whole program is great. It’s been really good for her.”

Rhythm and Me class

The Rhythm and Me residency was the first year of a three-year Arts Adventures partnership between FACT and Arts for Learning, with funding provided by the Hampton Roads Community Foundation.  The focus of the second year will be music and the third year will be visual art.

“We’re delighted to partner with FACT because the population they serve overlaps with a group of students that we prioritize reaching with our programming,” says Chris Everly, CEO of Arts for Learning. “We’re excited to be planning future collaborations.”