My students need craft, set, and costume supplies to help build our fall production, and an external hard drive to archive the beautiful world they create.
My drama students are some of the most creative and hardworking students I know. They are authentic, earnest, and willing to take risks. They accept and support each other and amaze me daily with their humanity, truth, warmth, and authenticity.
My students are from humble home situations (over 60% free/reduced lunch), and they struggle to find fine arts opportunities in our very rural, high-poverty school district.
We don't receive any funding from the school system for class drama activities or productions. Additionally and unfortunately, our school doesn't have an auditorium.
None of that stops my students, though. They create beauty from nothing every single day. Everything we have they create from whatever they can scrounge up. They paint, sculpt, glue, and stitch everything from the ground up. These students deserve supplies and resources to feed that creativity. They are indeed the music makers and dreamers of dreams of O'Shaughnessy fame.
My Project
My drama students create beautiful children's theater productions for our under-served elementary feeder schools and the public each year, playing to hundreds of youngsters who might never otherwise have the opportunity to watch a live performance. My students do this each season without the benefit of an auditorium, scene shop, or even a cent of school system funding. We are a high-poverty area, and we play in a small rented venue with no storage and no place to build sets, props, or costumes. Our productions must fit in a van in one trip-but look like we spent a week building onstage. The community acclaim that our productions receive are testaments to my students' creativity, tenacity, and ability to work with very little. These young people are consummate storytellers with a mission of theatrical outreach. They make magic year after year and are eager to expand their creative skills with this year's story of Charlotte's Web.
With the help of simple building and costume supplies, my students will spin Charlotte's Web, create barnyards and fairgrounds, and costume a multitude of lovable farm animal characters, including a splendid spider, gregarious geese, and a really rude rat.
And with the help of an external hard drive, they will be able to archive the wonderful work that they do-from process shots to the final production.
We don't have the space or funding to build traditional sets, but with the help of our requested supplies, we can make a little paint and fabric go a very long way. And every donated supply we receive allows us to use the little money we are able to raise to pay for royalties, scripts, and low-cost matinee opportunities for our feeder schools. Thank you so much for helping us tell stories worth telling. You are the real-life Charlottes.
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As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Mrs. Robbins and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
