SchoolsRule Supports Music, Arts, and Cultural Instruction for Kid Street Charter

Seated in a circle at the center of the Kid Street Charter theater floor, students in Erin Fightmaster’s sixth grade classroom drummed in unison, filling the audience-less room with rapid music. 

It was the final class in a six-week series on African drumming, in which students learned about specific beats, rhythms, and the cultural significance of the instrument in that part of the world. After a warm-up, students dove into a suitcase filled with traditional African clothing before learning a dance used for rite of passage ceremonies. 

The session was just one of dozens of arts-focused lessons that Kid Street Charter makes available to its students throughout the school year. The Santa Rosa-based school uses financial support provided by SchoolsRule Sonoma County to partially cover the program’s cost for all 120 students campuswide, Kid Street Charter Executive Director Kathleen Mallamo said. 

“Bringing arts into schools, it’s so important for self-discovery, self-esteem, and self-motivation for the kids,” Mallamo said. “It becomes a community endeavor when you are doing arts with other people.” 

The lessons help the school provide a well-rounded STEAM curriculum, or curriculum that combines science, technology, engineering, arts, and math, Mallamo said. 

Led by artists from the Artists in the Schools Residencies program offered by the Luther Burbank Center for the Arts, students participate in lessons tailored to their grade over the course of several weeks. The lessons combine subjects like dance and math, drama and social-emotional learning, and visual arts and social studies. 

“I think it has bigger implications than having some fun in the classroom,” Mallamo said of the arts-focused learning. “Kids want to come to school, they are here and they don’t want to be suspended because they feel good about themselves.” 

Fightmaster has worked with Nigerian instructor Onye Onyemaechi, who leads the drumming class, for four years. In that time, she said she’s seen how the music classes add variety to what can sometimes feel like a structured day of learning as she and her students jump from one subject to another. She added that this type of instruction can resonate in particular with students who aren’t traditional learners, and has strong ties with the math instruction that happens in her classroom. 

“This taps into something that they don’t usually get access to,” Fightmaster said of the drumming classes. “Music isn’t usually incorporated into a lot of education anymore, so I find it very important that that side of their brain gets exercised." 

SchoolsRule Sonoma County distributes funds to local education foundations and school districts without such groups on a per-student basis to boost students’ access to learning opportunities countywide. While spending is flexible, recipients like Kid Street Charter must align the funding along four funding areas, which includes STEAM.

To see how SchoolsRule Sonoma County is impacting schools throughout Sonoma County, visit the Our Impact page.