Harding Fine Arts Academy’s mission is to provide an arts enriched learning environment merging aesthetic and academic content to enhance student achievement and to encourage arts related careers and lifelong arts appreciation. We believe in the theory of multiple intelligences and that a person whose greatest gifts lie in the area of musical or visual-spatial intelligence is equally smart as a person who has great verbal or mathematical-logical intelligence. We know that our society is enriched by people from all walks of life and career preferences. The arts provide an excellent venue in which to promote innovative and critical thinking. By integrating the arts into the core curriculum, we are training our students to be the kind of creative problem-solvers that the business world is now seeking. The ability to make connections between disciplines and to apply a solution in one area to a problem in another is a skill that needs to be nurtured and encouraged in all learners. Both students who are academically and artistically inclined flourish in such an environment.
Our faculty’s credentials are impressive. Of our 25 staff members, collectively we possess four doctorates, eight master’s degrees, and thirteen bachelor’s degrees. Our faculty has applied for and received grants for Advanced Placement start up programs, science education, and equipment for music, art, photography, and dance. Our arts instructors are artist-educators with current and past career experience in the specialty they teach. They bring an authenticity to their programs that allow them to cite real-life examples as illustrations for what they are teaching. For example, the video production instructor films for ESPN. The drama teacher has acted and directed at Pollard Theater, Stage Center, and with several other theater groups here and in New York. Our faculty’s diverse talents extend into the core classes as well. Our students can learn how algebra and geometry apply to flight from their math teacher who is also a pilot, and what procedures real scientists use because their science teachers were both formerly researchers. The journalism teacher has his own online newspaper. Each of these creative and talented educators brings a depth of experience and knowledge to the classroom and extra-curricular activities they sponsor.