The Springfield Regional Arts Council (SRAC) celebrates its 11th year of conducting Arts in the Park Summer Workshops for area at-risk youth at the July 27, 2012 graduation ceremony from 12pm-1pm at The Creamery Arts Center.

Arts in the Park Summer Workshops is an eight-week SRAC program that exposes nearly 70 under-privileged children from the Springfield Community Center to music, dance, theatre, literary, and visual arts. This year is themed around Be Civil Be Heard, an initiative by the Springfield-Greene County Civility Project. Be Civil Be Heard’s ten tenets of civility were worked into each week’s arts lessons. The SRAC received a $10,000 grant from the Community Foundation of the Ozarks in conjunction with The Forest Institute to measure and summarize the impact of civility training for at-risk children while participating in this summer arts-enrichment program.

The students will be rewarded at the graduation ceremony with civility badges of honor they earned by exemplifying the ten tenets of civility. The public is encouraged to attend the ceremony to support the children who worked hard to express themselves through many forms of art.

Arts in the Park Summer Workshops are taught by a different local arts organization or teaching artist each week. The organizations and artists, in order of project schedule, include:

· Springfield Little Theatre

· Moxie Cinema

· Springfield Ballet

· The Claymobile (a mobile ceramic education program of the SRAC and Springfield Pottery)

· Springfield Symphony

· Visual Art taught by Kate Baird and Susan Goodman

· MO Poetry Slam, Springfield

· SRO Lyric Theatre (otherwise known as Springfield Regional Opera)

Arts in the Park Summer Workshops is a segment of Growing Up In the Arts, the SRAC’s year-round multidisciplinary instruction program for at-risk youth supported by The National Endowment of the Arts, The Musgrave Foundation, The Missouri Arts Council, The Junior League of Springfield, Inc., The Childhood in its Landscape Fund, The Community Foundation of the Ozarks, and the Freelander Family Trust.