This article appeared in the Windsor Times by Staff Writer Heather Bailey:
Day kicks off with an educational event for the community, finishes with all WHS arts being showcased; food from culinary and vineyard program in between
“Everything is happening on April 27, it’s a big day on campus for Windsor High School and the community,” said Allison Frenzel with a bit of understatement. A full day of activities is planned for that day, which will utilize and showcase a variety of the artistic offerings at WHS.
The day kicks off with “Engaging Creative Minds” a professional development event aimed at educators, artists and other community members to provide them information on things such as software, project management tools, websites, multimedia project development, social media and the creative process and the performing arts. The event will run from 10 a.m. to 3:45 p.m. and will feature breakfast and lunch catered by WHS’ culinary and vineyard programs.
The Nueva program (led by Frenzel) is putting on the event as part of a grant they receive each year from the California Department of Education. “It is part of our ‘model program’ grant that we provide regional professional development for educators who are teaching in arts, media and entertainment and industry pathways,” she said. “They selected Nueva because of our atypical interdisciplinary approach to (arts) production. WHS is a unique site because we have a beautiful CTE (career technical education) building and a robust media arts program and then we have Nueva, which is a production and managerial arts program.
“Recently, we changed the name of Nueva to Nueva School for the Arts, because (of) the new state standards for production and managerial arts. We’re aligning our courses to that instead of the performing arts pathway, because we’re not really training actors; we’re training kids how to put on these large-scale events. Each group of kids is responsible for a specific aspect of one show,” she finished.
WHS is one of eight demonstration sites in California, and is the only one in a region that stretches from Humboldt to Sacramento to South San Francisco.
“My job as regional tech is to support anybody who is interested in building a CTE program statewide and locally,” Frenzel said. “Before, we were just a demo site; people could come and we would demonstrate what we do. This year the (California Department of Education) wanted us to host a professional development event, so we decided to create an event that would be relevant and applicable for everyone in the community who is interested in learning about things like professional websites or project management and we wanted to make it as open as possible. It could be open for teachers in our industry sector and a professional development event for arts integration at the secondary level, but also design workshops around social media marketing for professional and personal promotional purposes. We’ve brought in some of our industry partners to run some of the works shops. My goal is that we have at least 50 educators and community members and teaching artists and arts organizations. We’re trying to make it as open as possible.”
Workshop panelists will include The Engine Is Red, Ed Troxell Creative and an alumni panel. The program and meals are completely free, but registration should be done ahead of time online at nuevaarts.org, in order to provide an accurate head count for food.