Dr. Sue Woltanski, Monroe County School Board member for District 5, joined Good Morning Keys on KeysTalk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about what’s happening in the district.
Arts in the schools continues to be alive and growing.
Woltanski said, “It’s very, very much dependent on support of the community. This weekend, the Key Largo School drama club will be having a performance of Junie B. Jones, the musical. Those kids came to drama camp for two weeks during the summer in order to have a show ready to go this soon, and it will be performed on the weekend for the community, but also it’s going to be a field trip for all of the elementary kids up here. All those schools have been invited to come watch it on Monday, to get the younger kids inspired, and Key Largo School has a tremendous drama teacher, Michelle Zofchak, people just call her Z and she is developing this program, and her students are then going to be able to go back into the younger classrooms at Key Largo school with performances that provide some education to them and inspire them to want to have the confidence to perform as well. So there’s a lot going on at Key Largo School with their drama clubs. I also was down at Horace O’Bryant School last week, and they have an amazing band teacher, Chris Hendricks. She has worked there for six or eight years, and she has taken that band from 45 students to over 140 students in that time period, and this year, she added a rock and roll music class, which has been super popular, so popular that she didn’t really have the equipment for it. She went out on Facebook, to ask people if they had anything lying around that her class could use and they got probably 50 guitars, multiple drum sets. She has mixing boards, microphones, keyboards, really, she has more than enough right now set up for, oh, I think she was missing one bass guitar, she now has in that class five different rock bands that are practicing together. This is middle school and it’s super exciting for the kids. They all want to be involved and later in the year, I think they’re going to start doing performances out in the community and without the community support for all of those things, they just wouldn’t happen. It’s important to the community that the kids have arts, but we also rely on the community to help us.”
The Florida Keys Council for the Arts is also active in the schools.
Woltanski said, “They were just up here celebrating 20 years at the History of Diving Museum. People may not be aware of, but it has always been involved with arts and kids in the Keys as well. They have an annual exhibit where kids create art from recyclables or from beach cleanup, trash, and this year, it has to do with the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Kids will be given pages from that book, and they’re to write poetry by blacking out all the words that they’re not using in their poem. So they’ll be given all the words on the page, and they have to create a poem out of that. So that’s a combination of art and literature. Literature, I believe, is art.”
Senator Ana Maria Rodriguez and Representative Jim Mooney recently provided $3.5 million to help restore Bruce Hall and Reynolds School and kick start affordable housing projects for teachers.
Woltanski said, “Bruce Hall is going to look beautiful. The exterior is all solid, maybe not the roof, but the interior will need to be renovated, and it’ll be a beautiful addition to that part of Key West. The plans are underway for Reynolds, which the maintenance which is now in Bruce Hall will move there, and we’ve signed the ground lease for the affordable housing, and they are getting ready for demolition any day now. The current administration building, which will move to Bruce Hall, is on an area that will become parking lot. So we have a year or so, a couple of years, to be able to move the administration building out while the other is being built. It was great to see Rep Mooney and Senator Rodriguez. They were instrumental and this was a three year plan. We went back at the apple three times and in a very tight state budget year for them to be able to help us get that across the finish line was tremendous. It was great to celebrate that with them this week.”
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