The City of Miami Beach has been exploring options to help promote the deployment of a STEAM initiative in Miami Beach Public Schools, and as part of this effort, the Mayor and Manager of Miami Beach met with Superintendent Alberto Carvalho to explore potential opportunities to deploy as part of the regular school curriculum.
The Bass Museum of Art (the Bass) has reached out to the City with a coordinated approach that involves multiple cultural institutions in the City. Through funding from The Knight Foundation from 2009-2013 The Bass embarked on a teacher professional development journey within the school system through the IDEAS program.IDEAS was conceived in 2009 as IDEA@theBass, in conjunction with Stanford University's Hasso Platner Institute of Design. IDEAS, which stands for identify, discuss, envision, apply, and share, comprises a variety of classes, tours and workshops for children, families and teachers. The curriculum provides an easy-to-use system that uses works of art as a catalyst for creative and critical thinking. Activities use Design Thinking strategies, an open-ended method of problem-solving that allows participants to brainstorm, build upon group ideas, and engage multi-disciplinarily, while learning about the Bass' collection and contemporary art exhibitions. This approach compels students and adults alike to use the '5 C's' of 21st Century learning theory: Critical Thinking, Creativity, Collaboration, Communication, and Character.
During aforementioned years, The Bass was able to conduct teacher professional development, serving 235 Miami Beach school teachers (with some repeating). In 2014, The Bass education department was awarded a $500,000 grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to implement a three-year family engagement outreach program entitled Creativity in the Community, which was designed to increase access to enriching intergenerational arts-based learning opportunities for parents and young children living in underserved communities throughout the Miami metro area. Through the development of Creativity in the Community, The Bass has successfully served 28,155 additional children and their family members through Kellogg-funded programming that includes multi-visit family sessions as well as participation in large community events. The Bass' community partnerships tripled with 59 community partnerships developed throughout the three years. Further, The Bass was able to hire and trained 23 AmBASSadors from within the partner communities, who teach workshops in English, Spanish, and/or Creole.
While all the cultural institutions in Miami Beach have cultural missions, integrating arts and cultural instruction into the K-12 daily schedule can be a challenge given the complexity of the school program, the diversity of the feeder pattern and the different mediums of cultural content providors. The Bass has conducted numerous meetings with school and arts stakeholders, and is prepared to launch a pilot test program for the Spring 2019 feeder pattern in the City of Miami Beach. The program will deliver into 6 of our public schools unique programming as created by the Bass, the Miami City Ballet, the New World Symphony, the Jewish Museum, the Wolfsonian, and Young Musicians Unite. Over 2000 children will be impacted at every grade level. The purpose of the pilot is to beta test the delivery of this arts programming into the daily school curriculum. The schools include Biscayne Elementary, Feinberg Fisher K-8 Center, Nautilus Middle School, North Beach Elementary, Miami Beach Senior High School, and South Pointe Elementary. The programming will fit into the Miami-Dade County Public school system STEAM initiative but take the arts programming to a new level.
The program have been carefully developed to provide grade-appropriate content for each level. And while not every grade level will receive instruction from all institutions, if the program is maintained after the pilot, all grades will experience all institutions over the course of the K-12 education. The details of each institutions deployment is shown in Attachment A. Over the course of the Beta project, each institution will be visiting their school partners at least 3 times on location and once at their institution. Each partnership includes a field trip to the location. Some cultural institutions will be culminating in a show or exhibition.
THE BASS (Partnered with North Beach ES, Nautilus MS, Biscayne ES, South Pointe ES, Fienberg Fisher K-8 Center, and Miami Beach SHS) The Bass IDEAS education initiative uses art as a catalyst for creativity and positive growth. The Bass will engage students to think creatively to solve real world problems such as sea level rise, climate change, and poverty. Students will learn how arts integration with other subject areas (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) is especially important to our communities in South Florida and throughout the world. Students will create art works that will later be shown at the Bass Creativity Center.
MIAMI CITY BALET (Nautilus MS, Biscayne ES, South Pointe ES, and Fienberg Fisher K-8 Center) Through creative movement and design students well explore the world of dance/movement and the process of design. Teaching artists will integrate curriculum teachers are working on with students in the classroom and help promote movement, creative thinking and exploration. These classes will help promote group interaction, creativity, body awareness, and classroom etiquette while collaborating with other subject areas. Some partnerships will culminate in a short showcase displaying what students have learned.
NEW WORLD SYMPHONY (Partnered with Miami Beach SHS) Currently working with Miami Beach Senior High Schools music programs to provide a creative approach toward activating the imaginations of youth through musical activities focused on classroom engagement and discovery of classical music.
WOLFSONIAN MUSEUM (Partnered with Nautilus MS) The Wolfsonian is offering an intensive variant of its already-established STEAM X Design and Zines for Progress programs, reformatted for delivery in two Grade 8 classes at Nautilus Middle School. In-class delivery involves a series of three visits to each classroom by a teaching artist, as well as one field trip to The Wolfsonian. This amounts to seven distinct touch points between The Wolfsonian and Nautilus Middle School.
YOUNG MUSICIANS UNITE (Partnered with Nautilus MS, Fienberg Fisher K-8 Center, and Miami Beach SHS) Will be providing free, consistent music programming to music programs in participating school. Students will learn the importance of STEAM in the music world through coding, recording, and practice. Through peer to peer mentoring, YMU engages students of different backgrounds and brings them together through a shared passion for music. YMU will be assisting schools struggling to maintain their instruments and equipment by teaching students how to repair their own instruments and supplying the tools needed to continue growing each program.
JEWISH MUSEUM (Partnered with North Beach ES, South Pointe ES, and Miami Beach SHS) Dedicated to telling the story of more than 250 years of Florida Jewish history, arts and culture, with a growing collection of more than 100,000 items the Jewish Museum will be education students on curating a museum, printmaking and the importance of STEAM in every day life.
The Bass has worked with the principals of each school to develop the cultural pairings for the pilot, with teachers involved in the lesson planning and schedules. The Bass will be instrumental by managing the program system wide, including agreements with the schools and the participating cultural organizations. The proposed budget of $188,842.00 as outlined in Attachment B provides part-time salaries for the program coordinator and director of education, part-time salaries for teaching artist (including training, preparations and planning) administrative overhead, background check fees, bus transportation for field trips, parking fees, program supplies and exhibition costs.
The following staff will oversee the project:
Kylee Crook has been an integral part of STEAM Initiative serving at the Education Consultant for the City of Miami Beach and Director of Education at The Bass Museum of Art. During Crook's tenure at the Bass Museum of Art, she has established, managed and expanded the museum's educational programming and administered several major grants, including the three-year Knight Arts Challenge which allowed for the creation of IDEA@thebass and the three-year Kellogg Foundation Grant which expanded the Bass Museum of Art's education outreach programming by 178%. Crook was named one of Miami Foundation's Miami Leaders for 2013-2014, and has sat as a grant panelist for major Florida funding organizations.
Koren Illa is a Miami based visual and performing arts education advocate, choreographer, director and instructor. Koren earned her BFA degree under the school of Education, Business and Performing Arts at Florida International University. Working in the visual and performing arts fields Ms. Illa has worked alongside Kaycee and the Sunshine Band, the Miami Heat, Arturo Sandoval, the Miss America Pageant Association, and assisted in directing a pilot episode for a TV series airing on Hulu in 2021. Koren has worked with both Miami-Dade and Broward county schools helping promote arts education through after school/in school programming and partnerships. With Koren's well rounded knowledge of the visual and performing arts, as well as M-DCPS Koren is an integral part of the STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math) initiative working with each cultural institution, M-DCPS and the City of Miami Beach to ensure this program exceeds all expectations.
The pilot does not include Treasure Island Elementary at this time, despite the fact that approximately 40 percent of attendees are Miami Beach residents. Given the additional efforts of coordinating with another municipality, it was not felt that this was feasible to achieve for February, 2019 implementation. None the less, if the pilot is deemed a success, it is anticipated that it would be expanded to Treasure Island Elementary for the Fall 2019 semester. In addition, other cultural instiuions could be added such as Miami New Drama and Irie Foundation.
The program will be monitored through monthly reports to include school hours performed by institutions and a monthly reported of curriculum delivered. In addition, the City will explore the potential to conduct periodic satisfaction surveys with parents, teachers, and students. This will provide information to be used in evaluating the implementation and funding needs for the program for the FY 2019/20 school year.
Funding is available from General Fund contingency for the beta program.
The proposed Term Sheet for the agreement with the Bass is provide in Attachment C.