The goals of the Visual Arts Program are to provide a sequential, cumulative program of concepts and skills from kindergarten through twelfth grade, all while promoting visual literacy through studies in art history, aesthetics, and art criticism.  The program strives to provide students with experiences that meet individual learning styles while engaging them in higher level thinking skills.  Students are presented with real-life art behaviors so learning the content of art becomes relevant - these include the elements and principles of art, the use of tools and media.

In addition, art students gain an understanding of the diverse cultures in society as reflected in the arts.  The program provides cooperative and interdisciplinary experiences and meets the New York State standards-based visual arts curriculum.  An Art education gives students an experience they can have from no other source and its position in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young what adults believe is important. 

Lessons the Arts Teach Students

• Make good judgments about qualitative relationships.
• Problems can have more than one solution.
• Celebrate multiple perspectives.
• Complex forms of problem-solving purposes are seldom fixed.
• Neither words in their literal form nor numbers exhaust what we can know.
• Small differences can have large effects.
• Think through and within a material.
• Learn to say what cannot be said.

Source: Eisner, E. (2002). The Arts and the Creation of Mind, In Chapter 4, What the Arts Teach and How It Shows.  (pp.70-92). Yale University Press. Available from NAEA Publications.