The following interview of Robert Capanna, Executive Director of the Settlement Music School in Philadelphia, by Judith Weitz, Coordinator of the At-Risk Youth Project of the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities in Washington, DC, was conducted for the President's Committee report, Coming Up Taller: Arts and Humanities Programs for Children and Youth At Risk . The interview first appeared in the January/February 1997 issue of Guildnotes from the National Guild of Community Schools of the Arts.

The conversation focuses on the Kaleidoscope Preschool Arts Enrichment Program. In addition, the Settlement Music School runs an arts in early childhood teacher training institute and an arts-focused after-school program, as well as a comprehensive community arts program at five branch locations that serves 7,000 students.

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Judith Weitz (JW): Bob, please start by describing the Kaleidoscope Preschool Arts Enrichment Program. What are the children doing that is different than what they would do in a regular preschool program?

Robert Capanna (RC): Kaleidoscope provides 60 children ages two and a half through five with a full day program in three preschool and one Kindergarten classroom. In addition to a high quality education program, Kaleidoscope includes a full nutrition program and a substantial parent involvement component. The unique feature of the program, though, is that the children also participate in music, dance and visual art classes with artist teachers who coordinate their curricula with each other and the "home room" teachers so that the children learn concepts in different media at the same time. For instance, if the organizing concept for a unit is "change" or "same and different" the children experience those concepts in words, in sound, in visual media and in movement.

JW: What can you tell us about the children who come to the Kaleidoscope Program?

RC: About 80 percent of the children come from the public housing development across the street and the other 20 percent within a five to six block radius. Approximately 85 percent of the families are on public assistance and a high percentage are single-parent families. All of the kids come from families that have incomes of less than $24,000 a year for a family of four. About 85 percent of the children are African American.

The environment in which they live is about as bad as it can get. None of the traditional supports are in place. None of the community or economic resources are there. And yet, these kids, if put into the right kind of environment, can absolutely flourish. When they get here, they have enough of their basic "kidness" left to have a good time. The Kaleidoscope Program uses the arts to provide as rich and stimulating an environment as possible; the program helps them identify and celebrate their strengths.

We understand that where these kids live is a real part of the rest of their lives: they are not going to divorce themselves from their families or their neighborhood. But, we hope that the Kaleidoscope Program will help them identify and pursue the positive aspects of what is there.

JW: What is particular power of the arts in building children's lives?

RC: Like sports and other activities, the arts create a sense of team-building, self-esteem, and discipline and provide an opportunity for children to organize their life around positive activities. But the arts also give kids an important expressive opportunity. Furthermore, in the arts, it is not about winning. The outcome isn't about someone doing better than someone else. It is much more about how well you can do for yourself.

It is not just that children express themselves in these artistic media but that by getting exposure to these media, they also apprehend their environment differently. For instance, on the things that kids do in the Kaleidoscope Program is sort instruments by sound. Well, sorting by sound has obvious analogues with making sets and organizing the environment, a concept that might be difficult to grasp in words but which they can do very successfully in other ways.

JW: When putting together the staff for a program like the Kaleidoscope Program, what characteristics are most important?

RC: It is very important for kids to come into contract with adults who are experts, because kids get it on a visceral level that they are dealing with somebody who knows all there is to know about a particular area. Even if you are dealing with kids of a very average ability, or even below average ability, when you put them in an art activity with a highly trained person who is at the top of the field, that communicates.

An artist also processes the environment and interacts with materials and with other people differently. When you put an artist in teaching environment, they stay artists. They learn about children and how to teach them, but they stay artists. When you put a teacher in that environment and give them some art skills, they remain a teacher with some art skills. There is a difference and the children know it. Our kids are in actual art studios with artist-teachers.

But, obviously, this is not the place for every artist: the people we hire must want to do this kind of work.

JW: The Kaleidoscope Program is one of a handful of arts programs whose outcomes have been documented. Why did you do an evaluation and what did you find?

RC: The main reason we got involved in the research study was that our lead funder agreed with us that it was absolutely essential that if we were going to do a program of this scale and scope, we had to find a way to measure outcomes. Those of us who are engaged in the arts understand, through observation, the tremendous effect of the arts on kids' lives. The Kaleidoscope Program gave us an opportunity to actually measure that effect.

We had a hypothesis: If children are given arts instruction, they become more capable. However, what would be meaningful was not that the kids came through the program as better artists but that they intellectually grew through the program. So that is what we tested.

We used standardized tests. We did baseline testing when the kids came into the program and the retested periodically. After the first year, we identified a control group of children at the housing development next door who were in a Title 20-funded kindergarten class. Our children scored lower than the others in the beginning and improved dramatically over time. The children in the control group, on the other hand, performed closer to the national norm: their test scores declined somewhat over time. Low income, inner city children typically start out behind because of developmental delays in language-related skills. Because they start out behind, they are always behind and fall further behind over time, unless there is some effort to address the lag.

JW: Do you have any plans to continue following these children?

RC: Yes. We have several ideas. One idea is to take the data we collected already and analyze it for its effect on math-related skills. In addition, the principal researcher for the original study is doing her doctoral dissertation on a longitudinal study of the children after they leave us. The idea is to track these childre's performance in the first, second and third grades.

JW: How would you describe the relationship you are trying to build with families?

RC: One of the great things that has happened with the Kaleidoscope Program is that we have become affiliated with the Learning Tree Head Start and receive partial funding through Head Start. The funding has allowed us to hire a full-time social worker whose basic responsibility is to coordinate services and to be the bridge to the families.

Parents and other caretakers serve as substitute teachers when staff are sick. They come in frequently for parent meetings and holiday celebrations and special programs. There is also a weekly newsletter that goes home. In addition, to reinforce preschool learning, the children's parents or guardians are encouraged to attend five hour-long parenting seminars each semester.

Involving parents is vitally important. First of all, most of the parents are very young people who have limited experiences and who are having a difficult time making it through life. The program has provided a very beneficial mentor-relationship between parents and faculty. We have had a number of parents who have decided to go back to school to get GEDs and to go on to community college.

JW: How is the Kaleidoscope Program funded and what have been the biggest challenges in raising those funds?

RC: We have not relied on a single source of funding. It is more consistent with the nature of being a communty-based organization to rely on a wide range of funding sources. In addition to institutional support, we have 1,500 individuals from all walks of life who support the school every year. It spreads the risk. It is not always the easiest approach but it is an important part of the strength of the school.

I was telling you earlier that the Settlement dance studio used to be the bath house! The logs of the first director of the school, who was called the "head worker" at that time, lists the daily activities: five piano lessons, six baths, three sewing classes, etc. This mix was all part of culture in the broadest sense.

We still need to deal with the whole kid. Part of the kid needs to brush his teeth, and part of him needs to go to the dentist, and part of the kids needs shoes on his feet and the other part of the kid needs a stimulating environment and an opportunity to express himself artistically. It is all part of the kid. However, because of the way we conceptualize service delivery and the funding of service delivery, some funders can be remarkably and painfully inflexible in their areas of interest.

JW: Based on your experience, what advice would you give to people who want to develop programs like yours?

RC: First of all, people have to understand that low-income, at-risk children are more like other children they've met than they are different.

Second, you need to focus on actually teaching children arts skills, which is very different from exposing children to great art, or giving them arts experiences, or telling them facts about art. Arts education is enabling children to do art.

The third point is that if you are going to do a program, and it is going to be high quality and it is going to have an impact on children's lives, then you must make a long-term commitment to it. You have to commit to being there for kids for all of the time you've said you are going to be. This commitment is a vital part of building a real relationship with the community. One of the reasons a place like the Settlement Music School has such credibility is because we've been on this block for 88 years.

JW: We talked earlier about the importance of developing an age-appropriate program for children. What did you mean?

RC: Quality programs have to take into account the development issues children go through at different ages and the learning styles that are most successful at different ages. This is well understood in general preschool education, but infrequently applied to arts instruction in any but an intuitive way. Children who are 5 years old or younger, for instance, benefit greatly from more frequent contact: daily or serveral times a week. As children get older, weekly programs can have an impact. But very rarely do one time programs have any lasting value for young children.

Part of the problem we faced in designing the Kaleidoscope Program is that in most arts there is not a lot of experience or information about working with very young children. Music is rare in that way. When we hired experienced artist-teachers for the program, they all looked at us and said, "Yes, but we've never worked with 3-year-olds or 4-year-olds. What do you do with them? What do they like?" So, we had to do a lot of exploration. We sat down with people who knew about child development in general and created a curriculum that would work.

JW: What would you like to see the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities do to support what you and others like you are doing?

RC: Send money!

I really think the biggest task before us is to translate the natural enthusiasm that most people have on a personal level about the arts into a shared perception that these kinds of programs are important for the community. Recently, I had a funny experience. The school district is building a new facility for a high school for the performing arts. A local radio show invited me to be one of the proponents. I expected to get people calling in and saying "Why are you going to waste money on this stupid frill?" In fact, everybody who called told us about some wonderful experience they had with the arts and why the arts were so important to their own school experiences.

My experience is that most people on a personal level value the arts. Where we fall apart is in translating their personal enthusiasm into a public commitment or policy. The President, the President's Committee and other leaders need to make sure that the public dialogue about the arts is on a level that ordinary people can relate to their own valued experiences.

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In October 1998, the Kaleidoscope Preschool Arts Enrichment Program was one of ten programs to receive a Coming Up Taller Award

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