The arts are basic to education. A school with strong arts education helps provide students with a complete academic experience, one that caters to the comprehensive nature of learning, development, and achievement. Through the arts, children build cognitive, perceptual, and analytic abilities. In the process, they also gain a heightened sensitivity, understanding, and respect for themselves and their diverse community. WHO'S DANCIN' NOW?, a documentary that explores the impact of early exposure to the arts

Providing all students with a complete education in the arts and humanities can help them cope with, and master, fast-paced technological advances, forces of globalization, and major demographic and societal shifts that characterize today’s world. The abilities to think creatively, to communicate effectively, and to work collaboratively are increasingly identified as necessary skills, along with the fundamental abilities to read, write, and use numbers. CENTER FOR ARTS AND CULTURE