Snow City Arts Foundation

In 2024, SCA will engage 500 students in 700 high-quality arts learning workshops resulting in 1,000 instructional hours across five disciplines: creative writing, visual arts, music, theater, and media arts. We will engage 100 students in Communities Creating Together, our virtual programming. We will facilitate change in level of engagement for 50% of students along both the Creative Decision Making and Techniques and Technologies assessment protocols. We will also engage our Teaching Artists in more than 900 hours of individualized or team-based professional development. Finally, we will produce two public-facing exhibition/events highlighting Snow City Arts and our students.

Our programming is built to meet students where they are as our Teaching Artists adjust programming to each students unique interests, abilities, and needs while providing the rare opportunity to work toward school credit while hospitalized. All programming adheres to a set of Best Practices that puts the student first and informs our methods for the development, execution, and evaluation that our Teaching Artists develop curriculum against Student Decision Making, Customized, Differentiated Learning, and Artistic Process Valued Over Art Product.

Across our five disciplines, our workshops include: Daily Discipline-Specific Projects in one of five disciplines which allows the student to explore interests uninhibited, resulting in a deepening of understanding and skill in arts concepts and where Teaching Artists craft curriculum designed to guide a student through the exploration of discipline-specific arts concepts and techniques; Peer-to-Peer Level Projects that provide creative ways for students to collaborate with other hospitalized children without being in the same room due to health conditions that limit students working side-by-side; and Personal Projects for children who are hospitalized for long periods of time who create a piece in a single genre or intersecting genres that to be completed over several days and visits of instruction, which allow a student to take pride in a sense of completion and ownership over their work.

SCA utilizes an assessment rubric with six-outcomes Creative Decision Making, Applying Techniques and Technologies, Sense of Self as Artist, Making Connections, Reflection, and Experimentation. These areas are measured over a four-point mastery scale: Exploring, Developing, Proficient, and Accomplished. This rubric is applied in every workshop that the Teaching Artists consider to be the student working at their normal ability. The rubric is not employed when a student is clearly not feeling well, but wants to engage in making art.

All Snow City Arts curriculum is aligned to state and national learning standards in the artistic and academic standards to ensure rigor. In January 2015, we adopted the New Illinois Learning Standards Incorporating the Common Core in Literacy and Math, the Next Generation Science Standards, the National Curriculum for Social Studies, and the recently released National Core Arts Standards.

Database

Snow City Arts is committed to making its data collection and assessment tools as robust and efficient as possible. Now in its fifth year of use, we hope to upgrade our custom-built Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)-compliant database to make reporting and deep data analysis more efficient. This software tool permits our artists and administrative staff to precisely track each student’s demographic information, mastery of learning standards, assessment outcomes, and artistic portfolio. The report function needs to be more robust. The goal of these improvements is to make it a more efficient tool for program staff, and to report deeper analytical trends that are not currently readily available.

School Reports

SCA’s software allows us to track individual student data, mastery of learning standards, and learning development. Twice each year, we produce comprehensive reports and artistic portfolios for each student who signs a release to be sent back to their home schools. By sending these achievement reports to students’ schools, SCA helps provide a continuous academic track for arts learning. Through an agreement with clinical staff and the Department of Child and Family Services, students in the inpatient psychiatric unit at Children’s Hospital University of Illinois are now eligible for such reporting and potential credit.

In 2023, SCA engaged 466 students in 668 hospital-based arts learning workshops, totaling 887 instructional hours. In addition, SCA engaged 335 participants in 14 community-based workshops, totaling 228 instructional hours.

87% of students were between the ages of 6 and 17. 24% of students were African or African American, 15.5% Caucasian, 30% Hispanic or Latinx, 1% Asian, .5% Arab, 3% Multi-racial, and 26% unspecified. 51% were female, 42% male, .2% Transgender Male, 1% Non-Conforming, and 5% unspecified. Approx. 72% of students came from low-income households and received free or reduced-fee medical care. 100% of students had a disability, either short-term or long-term, due to their medical condition.

In addition to our in-person hospital-based programs, SCA continued our Communities Creating Together (CCT) initiative, engaging 144 participants across 21 workshops for a total of 152 instructional hours. CCT leverages the virtual tools we developed during the pandemic to both broaden and deepen our impact. CCT includes Art Parties, hour-long virtual events open to our entire community focusing on the creation of a specific art project and led by a SCA Teaching Artist; and Open Studios, a virtual artist community of current and former SCA students working on a variety of projects to hone their creative skills. The third phase of CCT, our Youth Leadership Council, will launch in early 2024.

We are proud to share that Snow City Arts is the first-place winner of the 2023 Cam Busch Arts in Health Award, Arts Building Resilience category, given by the National Organization of Arts-In-Health. This national award is in recognition of Art Breaks, a pilot program launched by SCA early this year in partnership with Rush Wellness. The initial data is compelling: participant surveys indicate that prior to their Art Break, only 18% of participants reported being not stressed, and after their Art Break, 62% of participants did. Additionally, 97% of participants reported lower stress levels after their Art Break than before. The jury recognized this work as being exemplary for the entire field of Arts in Health. We have secured support to continue the program in 2024, and are eager to collect more data to further study the impacts of artmaking on clinician wellness.