The 2024-25 school year will bring new arts access for pre-kindergarten through eighth grade public school students from Lincoln, Tillamook, and Clatsop counties, with new school districts signing on to provide Sitka Youth Program services to their students.
Sitka has been actively expanding education for Oregon students in the arts and STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and math), focusing on reaching out to new communities and supporting underserved students.
Nine school districts in three counties are part of this growing expansion, all committed to offering Sitka Youth Program classroom experiences to their students for the upcoming school year, adding an additional 2,000 children to the student population served, for a total of 5,000 students statewide.
“We are thrilled to be able to expand our Sitka Youth Program into a much larger number of schools, and proud to partner with forward-thinking school leaders who see the need to address the gap in arts and STEAM access for rural Oregon students,” Sitka Center for Art and Ecology Executive Director Alison Dennis said. “The Sitka Youth Program is the centerpiece of our mission to serve a greater and more diverse population of people, an important part of supporting the next generation of Oregonians.”
Public schools in Sitka’s rural coastal community, all Title 1 schools, serve lower-income families, and due to budget constraints, have limited or no available arts programs, according to Dennis.
“Sitka developed its youth program to address this need, with the goal of providing high quality art and ecology programming to the youth of its rural areas,” she said. “Ninety-five percent of the kids in the Sitka Youth Program are economically disadvantaged, qualifying for free or reduced school meals under federal guidelines.”
Dennis added that the expansion of the Sitka Youth Program is an important step in increasing the Sitka Center’s service to Oregonians of all ages and backgrounds.
“Students learn in their school classrooms, from youth program art instructors and from professional guest artists,” Dennis said. “Teachers travel from classroom to classroom, school to school, during the academic year —curating the lessons to meet the needs of each age group of students.”
The Sitka Youth Program is partially funded by Youth Development Oregon, through a Youth Promise grant. Dennis said Sitka will seek additional funding to continue to grow its offerings to students.
The seventeen Title 1 schools participating in the program begin as far north as Astoria and run down the coast as far south as Waldport. The following school districts make up the full list:
• Astoria School District
• Jewell School District
• Knappa School District
• Lincoln County School District
• Neah Kah Nie School District
• Nestucca Valley School District
• Seaside School District
• Tillamook School District
• Warrenton-Hammond School District.
History
Founded in 1970, the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization committed to expanding the relationships between art, nature, and humanity.
The original vision was to create a community where artists and scientists could live, work, and teach — while deeply immersed in the nature of the nearly one acre of Sitka spruce forested land at Cascade Head Ranch, at the mouth of the Salmon River estuary.
In 2020, Sitka Center assumed stewardship of the youth programs previously led by Community Arts Project, a Tillamook County-based nonprofit (in operation from 1988 to 2020), including a school-based art literacy program and summer day camp.
The Sitka Center is located at 56605 Sitka Drive in Otis. To contact the center, call 541-994-5485. For more information, visit www.sitkacenter.org
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