REACH is a $8.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education to strengthen arts educational programming in the nation’s schools.

Through the development of a National Arts Learning Laboratory, that combines immersive PD opportunities with a robustly designed resource and communication portal that provides not only toolkits, planning and assessment tools, and best practices—but also activated network sharing across peers nationally, arts educators and teacher leaders will become better equipped to support their local communities. REACH will build this capacity by:

1) Creating collaborative models that can be replicated;

2) Increasing district and influential leadership support through PD delivered to both principals and superintendents;

3) Providing high quality, intensive research based and teacher led PD for a cadre of Teacher Leaders and Teaching Artists across the nation who will commit to extensive PD, both remote and in person, and engage in a multi-year national dialogue around refining arts learning strategies and sharing other best practices—virtually and on-going, through the REACH WebPortal, and in-person via two annual national convenings;

4) Providing support/coaching by teaching artists, experts in accessible arts, arts for persons with disabilities, and content experts;

5) Creating opportunities for planning, observation, and feedback meetings with colleagues and coaches;

6) Creating learning communities and dynamic resources such as webinars, best practice guides, and school arts action plans that can be used by all teachers;

7) Addressing English Language Learners (ELL) and Student with Differing Abilities and Needs or Disabilities by applying UDL principles for developing arts integrated units and assessments, and creating accessible arts instructional materials; and

8) Creating a common language/framework for arts specialists, classroom teachers, teachers of students with disabilities, ELL and bilingual teachers, teacher leaders, teaching artists, and partners who deliver arts integrated instruction.