El Puente’s Frances Lucerna on the Front Lines;
Integrating Arts and Education
By Robert Waddell, August 12, 2009
In the early 1990s, Frances Lucerna sat with a group of educators and community organizers on a Saturday morning planning one of the first small New Vision schools, El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Lucerna, who would be the school’s first principal, pointed to each person and asked them what school meant to them.
The responses were emotional and filled with descriptions of being “isolated” and “disrespected.” Lucerna and her planners decided then and there that their new high school would be the opposite of their own experiences, a positive learning environment for their students.
El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice was founded on the principals of education and community development, fostering a commitment in students to their humanity, mastery of their educational subjects while integrating art into the curriculum. Their idea was new then but has lately become the vogue in New York City public schools.
 Nearly 20 years ago, Lucerna and her team of educators were visionary because today small classes in smaller sized high schools have come into fashion and are the major corner stone in Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s educational overhaul and his taming of a daunting educational system. Arts-in-education has become a vital sticking point in funding for education and the mayor’s desire for a third term in office. While Mayor Bloomberg sees himself as the education mayor, he politically uses education as the foremost leverage in the upcoming Mayoral election.
On July 24th, the New York State Senate announced its compromise on mayoral control. According to State Senator Jose M. Serrano, it was a victory for arts education. Part of the compromise includes the formation of an Arts Advisory Committee to “analyze and comment on all policies that impact arts education,” a release read in part.
"The laws are already on the books for arts education, yet actual compliance is nowhere near where it should be," said Serrano. "The time is ripe for oversight, and for the kind of civic engagement that will breathe new creative life into our schools."
On the national level, Americans for the Arts has called upon Congress to increase federal funding for arts education through the department of Education. This $53 million in funding, nationally, would support programs in newly emerging school models in high-poverty areas to improve arts learning, AFTA reported on their website.
“We were interested in the other 3 Rs – rights, responsibility and respect,” said Luis Garden Acosta, founder and president of El Puente, a community educational center dedicated to holistic learning with the same values adopted by El Puente Academy. The high school currently has 160 students enrolled and the school has had a near 100% graduation rate, said Garden.
Many of El Puente’s students are immigrants who come from economically challenged backgrounds. A major goal of the school is for parent’s involvement in their child’s education, and in the school’s 12 point mission statement, the integration of arts is a major part of their core curriculum.
“As far as I’m concerned,” said Lucerna, “a good education comes from the integration and exploring of student’s humanity through the arts.”
The idea of combining an agenda of peace, justice, community activism, human rights with arts and education has been a success since the school’s inception with at least a 90% acceptance rate to college from the last 13 graduating classes. After all these years, Lucerna said that it’s about staying true to the core values and mission that began the school.
“We have always been committed to take time to reflect, to come back to the essential quest,” she said. “Are we true to our commitment?...The role of the arts can impact the lives of so many students.”
Growing up in Williamsburg, Lucerna became involved in a theatre company at the Transfiguration church, which practiced Liberation theology. She became a community organizer and an actress, singer and dancer in productions as varied as West Side Story, Fiddler on the Roof and South Pacific. The combination of community activism and art helped Lucerna experience “my own physical and spiritual power,” she said.
Lucerna would leave Williamsburg to become a professional dancer. She then returned in 1982 to do community work with El Puente. She and a team of artists and activists opened El Puente Academy in 1993.
“Young people were motivated to be involved in their own development and academic success,” said Lucerna. “We were creating leaders for peace and justice with community and youth development.”
When the school first opened its doors, El Puente Academy was a new experiment between a Community Based Organization that partnered with the then Board of Education. The school had to prove its legitimacy with standardized tests but it was this new approach to education, a small school with community involvement and arts that gave the school teeth and traction. Nationwide, El Puente Academy has become a model for other schools.
“We were a group of community educators, not a group of certified teachers,” said Lucerna. “There would be skepticism with people saying ‘what do we know about education?’”
As part of a national study linking arts and education, the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, along with The National Latino Education Agenda Research Project, which was funded by the Ford Foundation, have researched the positive impact education and art have on a student’s academic success like mastery of subject matter, graduation and going on to college.
“(Art) as a pediogical tool that engages a student in academic content,” said Pedro Pedraza, researcher at El Centro. “It (arts education) has an impact on a student’s development and a tremendous transformative impact on students.”
Pedraza spent four years studying the history, implementation and impact that arts integration has had on El Puente’s students. The study’s national findings will be released later this year.
 As well as at El Puente Academy, over the years there have been other committed organizations dedicated to keeping art and education together for New York City students.
For over 50 years, the East Harlem Tutorial Program, has been dedicated to keeping students engaged academically and promoting a creative outlet for student’s talents and energy while integrating art into education. EHTP encourages over 800 students, ages 5 to 21, to develop self-expression while achieving a passion for learning. EHTP also helps students understand the world in which they live so that they can make informed decisions about their lives.
Since 1967, Teachers and Writers Collaborative, has enlisted the talents of writers and placed them in residences within schools in order to bring art back into the classroom. Not only do Teachers and Writers classroom injections promote literacy but writers have partnered with classroom teachers, working on projects that keep students engaged in their education and using their creativity for self-expression and self-examination. The students are encouraged to think of themselves as writers, working on grammar, reading contemporary and traditional literature and re-writing to final publishable drafts.
“The main impact art can have, to teach creative writing you teach critical thinking and problem solving,” said Nuyorican Poet Jesus “Papoleto” Melendez who has worked with both the EHTP and Teachers and Writers.
Melendez believes that art shouldn’t be considered as extra-curricular or a subject separate from education but be an integrated part of teaching English, history, math and science.
“Art is so creative,” said Melendez, who has taught writing to junior high and high school students, adults, prisoners and senior citizens, for over 30 years, “you can’t design a chair, a stool, a nail, anything without art. One student told me that she didn’t know that to be a poet, it helps to be good at math.”
Mia Roman Hernandez has been a youth arts instructor for three years, bringing her joy of painting, poetry and photography to workshops for students ages 4- 14. Hernandez said that art integration into education gives students an opportunity to think creatively and logically.
 “This is a big opportunity for students to express themselves,” said Hernandez. “The language of art has been used for centuries….Society thinks students need to be trained to be business people but art is an activity for their future. It’s not just extra curricular. Until someone recognizes the influence art has on someone’s life, it’ll never be taken seriously.”
In her art workshops where she has taught adults, Hernandez has been surprised that these adult students write poetry, paint or a take a photograph for the first time in their lives.
German poet Fredrick Von Schiller wrote, “Keep true to the dreams of your youth.” And to be sure, Lucerna’s dedication to community development, arts and social responsibility have not waned since she was 14-years-old. If anything, her commitment and ideals to the integration of art and education have never been stronger. Today, Lucerna serves as Artistic Director of El Puente.
“It speaks to the structure of our school,” said Lucerna, “to support our young people with a holistic approach…they need affirmation and validation to highlight their experiences and the role of Latinos in history and how the role of the arts can impact student’s lives.”
This story was developed through the Education Beat Writing Fellowship at the New York Community Alliance. |
