To give our students a well-rounded experience, ASAS P&C provides daily learning in the following categories: Health & Wellness; Academic Readiness; STEM Programming; Career Exploration Experiences; and the Visual & Performing Arts. Social-emotional learning is woven into each of these components, ensuring that our youth have the personal growth needed to turn positive changes into lifelong habits.

In exposing our students to Visual & Performing Arts, ASAS P&C helps our youth self-express, gain confidence, build empathy, and explore social justice, race, and equity. Art serves as an outlet for emotion, helping students process both positive and negative events in their lives. Currently, we offer classes around music, dance, and visual arts. In the 2019-2020 school year, we would like to offer improv comedy classes in two of our school sites. With this, students will explore short-form improv with each class building upon skills learned in the previous courses. Through the class, students will learn key improv rules such as “yes, and” as well as how to develop characters, create objects and environments through miming, and expressing emotions. At the end of the 8-week course, students will have the chance to perform what they’ve learned to their fellow classmates and families as well as school and program staff.

Through our holistic approaches to extended day learning, ASAS P&C helps our students transform the way they see themselves and their ability to impact the world. ASAS P&C gives youth access to valuable after-school programming that puts them on equal footing with their peers and sets them up for long-term success. While the proposed program itself is an art-based program, improv comedy is a natural fit in our academic and social-emotional learning components as improv assists in building self-confidence, stage presence, active listening, critical thinking, and community.