ST. MARTIN PARISH, La. (KLFY) — The Acadiana Center for the Arts (ACA) is partnering with the St. Martin Parish School Board to bring new arts opportunities to all schools in the parish.

The initiative has been in development for several years and is now being implemented across the parish. John Downs, the St. Martin Parish Magnet Coordinator and Bree Sargent, Education Director for the Acadiana Center for the Arts, said the partnership will make a lasting impact on students.

“We have our St. Martin STEAM Academies programs here in St. Martinville and St. Martin Parish, and we’re very excited to show the whole parish what we offer,” Downs said.

The partnership aims to integrate music, dance, and theater into the curriculum for students from kindergarten through twelfth grade, providing them with new opportunities to experience the arts. The Teaching Artist Program will involve training practicing professional artists to work with students of all grade levels.

“We’ll actually bring performers into schools, musicians, dancers, theater groups, into schools for students to be able to experience live performance without leaving school, we also have a program that will be going in called the teaching artist program where we work with professional artists and train them to be able to work with students of all grade levels,” said Sargent.

St. Martin Parish is the fourth district to join this initiative, following Lafayette Parish, St. Landry Parish, and Vermilion Parish. The programs are free and accessible to all students in the parish.

Bree Sargent expressed enthusiasm about partnering with local artists from within St. Martin Parish to enhance the program’s reach and impact.

“If there are any artists out there in the community we love to work with artists from within St. Martin Parish and train them to have the skills to be able to do that, so those programs are going to be going into every school in K through 12th grade in the parish,” said Sargent.

With the implementation of these programs, students in St. Martin Parish will have increased access to arts education, potentially enriching their educational experience and fostering a greater appreciation for the arts.

All facts in this report were gathered by journalists employed by KLFY. Artificial intelligence tools were used to reformat from a broadcast script into a news article for our website. This report was edited and fact-checked by KLFY staff before being published.

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