BLJHS Gifted Program Gains Grant for Film Project
CONNORVILLE-And--action!
Buckeye Local Jr. High School’s gifted students are getting behind the camera after the program gained a $6,400 Teach Arts Ohio Grant through the Ohio Arts Council to develop a documentary. Gifted teacher Stephanie Crust obtained the funds and said Rikki Santer, a Columbus-based journalist, teacher and 2023 Ohio Poet of the Year will spend 18 weeks educating sixth-through eighth-graders about filmmaking.
“We’re having a teaching artist with the Ohio Arts Council come. Rikki Santer has worked with my gifted students in the past and she’ll come in to teach film studies, and the goal is to develop their own documentary,” Crust said. “The students will collaborate on the documentary and work with teacher Dan Davis’s media class to edit the film.”
The project, which is entitled “Lights, Action, Documentary,” will help students acquire the critical tools they need to analyze films, and then use that knowledge to create a documentary focusing on a community issue. Santer will conduct the sessions and aid with the production along with Crust, plus she will help coordinate efforts with Davis. In turn, Davis will provide access to cameras and editing equipment, while his technology students will act as technical coaches.
Santer will be on site each week starting in late October and Crust was excited to cooperate with the artist once again.
“Rikki and I connected because my students participate heavily in creative writing opportunities, and she is an Ohio poet. Last year, she traveled to Buckeye Local multiple times to work with my gifted high school creative writing team and with my gifted junior high students, and we discussed how we could collaborate more in the next school year,” Crust explained. “I am very excited to work with her further and I think that the kids and I will benefit greatly from her expertise.”
Santer has worked as a journalist, a magazine and book editor and more, authoring collections of original poetry and earning honors as the 2023 Ohio Poet of the Year. Additionally, she has served as a poet-in-the schools, a high school teacher of English and film studies, director of a student writing center, and a vice-president of the Ohio Poetry Association. She has also acted as a teaching artist through the Ohio Arts Council and received numerous honors, including The Poetry Forum’s William Redding Memorial Contest, Ohio Poetry Association, Ohio Poetry Day, Zachary Doss Friends in Letters Fellowship through Heavy Feather Review, the Derick Burleson Poetry Contest from Choeofpleirn Press, and the Poetry Society of Tennessee, the Pennsylvania Poetry Society, the National Federation of State Poetry Societies, and the Best of Ohio Writer Contest sponsored by the Poets’ & Writers’ League of Greater
Cleveland, to name a few. Her collection, Resurrection Letter was grand prize short-listed for the Eric Hoffer Book Award and her most recent collection, Shepherd’s Hour, won the Paul Nemser Book Prize from Lily Poetry Review Books.
According to its website, the TeachArtsOhio (TAO) program joins schools with teaching artists to share engaging, personal, high-quality arts learning experiences. Residencies can vary from short introductory exposures lasting as few as 10 days to in-depth immersive experiences spanning a full school year. Creative and experienced teaching artists, through TAO grant awards, offer learners the opportunity to participate in a unique creative process, bridge cultural differences, develop fresh ways of learning through the arts, and realize lasting benefits from collaboration with professional artists who are experienced in working with school-age children and youth. TAO is a school’s opportunity to work with a professional teaching artist to supplement arts instruction. Through a collaborative effort between teachers, artists, and administrators, the program supports in-depth, sustained arts instruction and does not reduce a school’s commitment to engage professional arts educators to teach the arts.