Hi Erica,
We all feel your pain! I find recruitment of guys really is linked to recruitment of all. When I took over the program a while back, it was just as you describe it--just theatre kids doing their thing separate from everyone else. Together with the adult volunteers and students, we set a goal to have over 10% of the high school student body involved in the theatre program in some way. That's more than the football team roster! This included actors, musicians, crew, technical, music business, publicity, merchandising, and more. We not only expanded the traditional student roles, but also started a youth mentorship program. We found that students lost their view of "cool" arts around the middle school years. So, we worked to create an elementary and middle school camp, we strengthened the consistency of the middle school theatre arts program, we raised the acknowledgement of theatre arts through ITS, and we talked about the accomplishments of productions and theatre arts kids constantly. I spend a lot of time sharing stats with school administrators about the success of our students (% of student body, strength of academics, community service hours, award achievements, etc), and they in turn incorporate it into public addresses for the community like school board meetings, opening ceremonies, and graduation. We participate in school district pride days, the homecoming parade, minithon talent shows, and everything we possibly can to show the full view of our presence in the community We changed the narrative about how we talk about theatre arts, and it made a big difference for us.
Hope these ideas help, but please feel free to reach out if you'd like to chat more.
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Jasmine Bucher
Musical Director
Palmyra Area High School
Palmyra Area High School
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Original Message:
Sent: 09-27-2021 12:11
From: Erica Davidson
Subject: Breaking the Stigma
As I'm sure many of you have or are currently dealing with, I am facing a problem with student participation especially in the male department. Our school has a negative stigma on "theatre kids," and it is really putting a damper on our numbers. We used to have athletes to audition, and now if you are an athlete you can't audition for a show because it's not the "popular" thing to do. I had my students fill out a quick survey and 98% of them said that being in a play or musical isn't the cool thing to do. I would love to get feedback from my fellow educators. How do I go about fixing this?
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Erica Davidson
Theatre Teacher
University School of Jackson
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