Austin has been heralded once again for our commitment to the arts. And this time, the children of Austin will benefit.

The Austin Independent School District (AISD) announced Wednesday on their website that Austin has been chosen by The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts as the seventh partner city for Any Given Child, a program that creates long-range arts education for students in K-8. The city will join a list of other participating cities such as Sacramento, Tulsa, Portland and Las Vegas.

According to Wednesday's press release, the Kennedy Center chose Austin due to “the city’s and the school district’s strong commitment to the program and to the importance of the arts in education.”

Even with last year’s brutal job cuts, AISD made efforts to maintain the availability of arts offerings at all three levels of education while many school districts around the country and the state sacrificed the arts first in their budget plans.

Any Given Child will allow AISD to continue making arts education a priority with fine arts specialists and instructors used to enhance everyday curriculum. While the Kennedy Center will not be providing money, they will help develop resources. According to Dr. Brent Hasty with Austin arts initiative MindPOP, there are almost 45,000 arts specialists in Austin just waiting for the opportunity to share their talents with the students at schools all across the city.

MindPOP is a unique Austin-based organization geared toward identifying and overcoming gaps in access to arts education with partnerships with 50 local arts and cultural agencies. Teams of problem solvers, like Hasty, find creative solutions, whether financial, institutional or organizational.

According to Hasty, MindPOP will work alongside The Kennedy Center to provide the consulting resources the district needs to implement a series of agreed-upon action plans. The first phase is testing and evaluation, which may take up to a full academic year.

To allow this research, MindPOP launched a pilot project at McCallum High School and its feeder stream of middle and elementary schools called “The Creative Classroom.” This initiative integrates arts-rich lessons into the core curriculum and will provide evidence of the effects of arts education upon test scores and student engagement and retention.

“After only a week of school, we’re getting text messages from teachers saying how much they love it,” reports Hasty. “Already, the fine arts teachers are feeling a raise in their status at the school.”

After the initial auditing period, the Kennedy Center will make their recommendations for implementation plans for the entire district. “We will be working with local partner artists like Theatre Action Project and Ballet Austin to go into schools as experts,” says Hasty. “And whatever we can’t find in Austin, the Kennedy Center will bring in from around the country.”

A large part of this process is getting the word out and making educators and administrators aware of the cultural offerings in Austin that could benefit their students. To do so, MindPOP is launching a searchable database for educators that will include all the information they would need. The database will be available soon in an “Education” tab on Austin Creative Alliance’s Now Playing Austin website.

While it will take a while to obtain all the findings they expect and implement changes, MindPOP expects that Any Given Child will seriously transform the way Austin’s schools look and feel for a long time to come. “This partnership will impact us for at least the next six years, probably more,” says Hasty.

At the press conference announcing the program, Austin City Manager Marc Ott agreed, saying, “Austin prides itself as a model for artistic expression and creative innovation. It’s vital that we provide tools to nurture those skills at every age so Austin maintains this identity for generations to come.”

Many teachers starting up at school may wish they could adopt these principles in their classrooms as well. But, rest assured, help is on the way.