Resolve Honored with Growing Up Artfully Award for Excellence in Arts-in-Education (6/15/2011)

Ron Prator, Ph.D., Supervisor of Quality Assurance/Resolve

For the last 10 years, Resolve Behavioral Health Services, in conjunction with Touchstone Theatre, has offered a theater program for high school students. Over the course of those ten years, the program has evolved from a simple theater activity to a much more sophisticated “tool” for delivering an academic and behavioral curriculum. The program has specifically-defined goals, procedures, and methods to measure outcomes. The goals of the program are linked to a number of Pennsylvania Academic Standards.

                Locally, the Allentown Art Museum oversees the statewide Arts in Education program. Representatives from the museum became aware of our program and asked if we would accept a nomination for a Growing Up Artfully Award for Excellence in Arts-in-Education. This award was being offered by the Lehigh Valley Arts Council. Nominations were open to 23 school districts and the Diocese of Allentown. We accepted the nomination and submitted all of the supporting documentation.

                We were named one of ten finalists (for 3 awards) and were invited to the awards reception, which was held on April 14, 2011 at Penn State Lehigh Valley. We won one of the awards and were given a specially-commissioned work by woodturner Tom Buchner. After the reception, I was approached by a member of the awards committee. She told me that the committee was “deeply moved” by the work we were doing and the impact we were having on children.