The American Theatre Wing announced today the recipients of the Andrew Lloyd Webber Initiative Classroom Resource Grants. Grant requests of up to $100,000 were considered for K-12 public schools, with over 175 applications received, which requested nearly $6,000,000 in total. This year’s recipients are: Broome Street Academy (New York, NY), Calumet New Tech High School (Gary, IN), Covington High School (Covington, LA), Fern Creek High School (Louisville, KY), Fort Walton Beach High School (Fort Walton Beach, FL), Gocio Elementary School (Sarasota, FL), and Sky Harbour Elementary (San Antonio, TX).
“I believe passionately that the arts should be available to all young people. The grant proposals received revealed an incredible level of need in every corner of America. This is merely a start – and a thrilling one – but I’ve never been more aware of the challenge ahead,” said Andrew Lloyd Webber.
“There is no more vital way to ensure the long term health of our art form than to provide educational resources for young students with a passion for the theater. The need is nothing short of overwhelming, and our goals are ambitious. We are filled with pride over this year’s grants. Our focus is now on the expansion of this program that Andrew started, to cover even more schools across every corner of this country,” said Heather Hitchens, President of the American Theatre Wing.
With the Andrew Lloyd Webber Foundation’s help, the American Theatre Wing is investing in Public Schools to help drama teachers get more of the resources they need to provide quality drama instruction in their schools. This project is an expansion of the work that the multi-Tony Award winning composer and producer has been doing to promote and fund arts education through his Foundation in the United Kingdom.
Through this Classroom Resource grant-giving program, funding is provided directly to under- resourced public schools to provide instruments, dance floors, lighting grids, and other necessary materials to help create new and enhance existing theatre programs.
These inaugural grants are part of the American Theatre Wing’s Andrew Lloyd Webber Initiative, a major new national initiative which received $1.3 million in seed funding from the Andrew Lloyd Webber Foundation to promote diversity, equity, and access to the arts. The Initiative’s focus is to bridge the gap between talent and opportunity, creating a stronger pipeline to the professional theatre for promising artists of all backgrounds—fostering a future generation of theatre makers and patrons that reflects the diversity and dynamism of America as a whole.
The three components of the initiative are annual Classroom Resource Grants, Training Scholarships, for middle and high school students covering the costs to attend summer study and after school training programs and University Scholarships, providing financial support of $40,000 over 4 years for students to pursue theatre studies at the University level.
