Tony Simmons, Executive Director at High School for Recording Arts, talks about the importance of viewing all students as contributors and honoring that they have something to offer the world.
[MUSIC PLAYING] We don’t see young people coming to the doors. Oh, well, how long have you been out of school? What’s your test score? What’s your IP status? As if we’re there to fix them. We’re looking at the fact that they have already been contributing something to the world.
And we have an opportunity now to engage with them, and to explore that with them, and to honor the parts that we know that comes from a good place. Now once you begin to do that and you begin to build a relationship, you begin to build trust.
We could begin to identify some of the things that may not be so good as happened to them. Or that they may even be expressing that we can then together explore those things and figure out as a learning community, you know, how do we– what are we trying to do? How do we imagine our lives being as we take this life journey?
What do we imagine in our community looking like if we come to it with the highest expectations? And knowing that, they’re empowered to affect change. And music and creativity has been a powerful force for change. And they have those weapons if you will, to make that change.
