CENTER FOR CREATIVE EDUCATION

The Center for Creative Education’s mission is to transform teaching and learning through creativity and the arts. Our goal is to disrupt educational inequality by successfully teaching our students the foundations of learning—reading proficiency, curriculum engagement, creative practice, and academic achievement. CCE provides a much-needed alternative approach to teaching and learning that reaches a diverse range of learners and inspires students to want to learn.

On January 4, 2021, Center for Creative Education opened a new and innovative K-5 school called The Foundations School. This school uses an arts-integrated approach to teaching and learning, leveraging subjects like music, painting, and more to engage students in academic subjects. Additionally, The Foundations School relies on small class sizes and regular assessment to provide students with the one-on-one attention they need to succeed.

CCE’s goals are:

• To be a leader in transforming educational environments and systems to better prepare students to meet the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century with courage and confidence.

• To ensure equal access to and equal opportunity in educational programs.

• To provide research-based recommendations for the future training of teachers.

• To end multigenerational poverty through educational success.

The concept of The Foundations School grew out of a year-long strategic planning process to envision what CCE’s next 25 years will accomplish: a deeper impact on children’s learning, a more powerful collaboration with our neighborhood needs, and a more impactful role in disrupting educational inequality by providing a successful model of teaching and learning. As student literacy needs are persistent and the neighborhood crisis is pressing, we are eager to dive into this next chapter of our organization’s mission.

Neighborhood Strategies

• Offer an affordable, high-quality education with certified teachers and teaching artists to low-income students in our neighborhood.

District-wide Strategies

• Continue to provide direct creative and educational outreach services across Palm Beach County.
• Develop out-of-school programs at our facility focused on improving academic performance.
• Provide professional development and curriculum design for the district focused on increasing teacher and teaching artist capacity that promotes a student-centered learning environment.

Nation-wide Strategies
• Building a school model that will evolve into a transferrable model to be used in other communities.
• Design and develop a demonstration elementary school used for the training of future teachers, educational experimentation, educational research, and professional development.
• Provide consulting, applied research, program design, and evaluation services to individual schools, school districts, cultural organizations and researchers on the role of creativity in the field of education.

Center for Creative Education’s capabilities include longevity, district-wide programming, multi-million-dollar fundraising, academic insightfulness, and the capability to impact over 9,000 students per year. Since CCE was created in 1994 as an educational nonprofit, we have increased our budgets, started construction on a new campus, and increased the spread of arts education and the number of arts offerings in Palm Beach County classrooms and afterschool.

Today, we are capable of delivering professional teaching of the arts to more than 9000 students and hundreds of teachers. CCE transforms artists into “teaching” artists who collaborate with classroom teachers to demonstrate how creativity and the arts can benefit the learning process for all students. Our collaborative, professional development model continues to be one of the most impactful advancements that CCE has given to education in Palm Beach County.

Additionally, CCE operates The Foundations School, a K-5 independent school that aims to break the barriers of traditional learning through the arts. This school gives us the ability to serve low-income students, work with community partners, and further develop our unique model for teaching and learning.

Neighborhood Progress

We opened The Foundations School in January 2021 to address the growing literacy crisis in our community. In our first year, our third grade students started the year with only 33% of students reading on or above grade level. By the end of the year, 67% of students were reading on or above grade level, an increase of 34%.

Additionally, we saw growth in our students creative capabilities. We measure this by assessing students’ growth in four areas: creative confidence, problem-solving, originality, and creative elaboration. The assessments are conducted three times a year: at the start of the school year, mid way through, and once again at the end of the year. At the beginning of the school year, our students were measuring at a level 2 on average, meaning that they were scoring as “malleable” on a 1-4 level scale (stable, malleable, creative, and creative competence). By the end of the year, the students collectively averaged a gain of one level, advancing to level 3, or “creative.”


District-Wide Progress

• CCE is a leading provider of resources, support, and professional development services for teachers, principals, teaching artists and other education professionals in Palm Beach County, surrounding counties, and in select other regional and national locations.
• CCE attracts a growing number of students to its on-site and at campus services.
• CCE is recognized for not only the quality but the impact of its work – in the lives and communities it serves.
• CCE has developed a Board of a composition and engagement that is on par with the institution's needs and aspirations.
• CCE enjoys a growing base of annual donors, members, sponsors, foundation, and government supporters, leading to an increasingly diversified revenue base.
• CCE enjoys a working capital base and human resource pool sufficient to sustain and flourish.