Inside Kenwood's 'Smarts + Arts' Approach

Where art is not an afterthought

At many schools, the arts are the first program to fall when budgets tighten. At Kenwood Community School, administrators say, the arts are the load-bearing wall. The school's slogan, Smarts + Arts, is less marketing copy than a description of how a typical week is structured.

According to the school's own materials, arts integration and artist residencies appear at every grade level, meaning students encounter working artists, musicians and performers as a regular part of instruction rather than as a once-a-year assembly. A residency might bring a visual artist into a science unit or a musician into a lesson on history, with the art and the academics taught as one thing rather than two.

Teachers say the approach helps children who might stall on a conventional worksheet find another door into the same material. A child who struggles to write a paragraph about a historical event, the reasoning goes, may understand it perfectly when asked to stage it, draw it or set it to music, and then find the writing comes more easily.

We are trying to educate the head and the heart at the same time.— A longtime Kenwood teacher

The model also reflects the commitments Kenwood lists alongside the arts: academics, rigor and race equity, three threads that staff describe as inseparable from the creative work rather than competing with it. The school frames its mission as inclusive and student-centered, and treats the arts as a means to that end rather than a decorative add-on.

Arts-integration approaches like Kenwood's have a long track record in American public education, and proponents point to research suggesting they can deepen engagement and retention. Skeptics counter that the arts can crowd out core instruction; Kenwood's answer is that, done well, the two are the same lesson taught twice over.

For Lowry Hill and Kenwood parents weighing the neighborhood school against private academies and magnet lotteries, the arts emphasis is frequently cited as the reason they stay. It is, several say, what makes the neighborhood school feel like the neighborhood's school, distinctive enough to compete with the alternatives rather than merely the default by address.

That distinctiveness has practical stakes. The residencies and integrated programming cost money, and much of the funding for enrichment extras comes from the PTA and, at times, the neighborhood association rather than the district's base budget. In a year of districtwide budget strain, families are aware that locally raised dollars increasingly underwrite the very thing they came for.