The Jazz & Heritage Foundation will be holding the Arts in Education Community Forum at the George and Joyce Wein Jazz & Heritage Center on Tuesday, Feb. 24, from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.

The local organization will be presenting background information on the arts-in-school initiative, an overview of the Kennedy Center’s Ensuring the Arts for Any Given Child program, preliminary results of their New Orleans surveys, and there will be a performance by the KIPP McDonogh 15 Middle School Brass Band.

Last September, New Orleans was selected by the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, as the 16th city to benefit from the Any Given Child program, which helps cities across the country develop a strategic plan and implement expanded arts instruction for every K-8 student.

The foundation partnered last year with the City of New Orleans, KID smART, the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts and Tulane’s Cowen Institute for Public Education Initiatives to develop a plan to encourage putting the arts back into the schools.

Since then, a large “community arts team” has met monthly with facilitators from the Kennedy Center to begin developing a strategic plan for arts in the schools.

One of the first steps in the process was conducting a large survey to gather data on precisely what arts instruction is being offered – and what isn’t – in New Orleans schools. The survey also included information on attitudes: What do school administrators, teachers and artists want to see in our classrooms?

The Arts in Education Community Forum is also an opportunity for the foundation to gather input on several aspect of this effort. These include public awareness of arts-in-education as a major political, cultural and economical issue, policy and government, allocation of resources and budget priorities along with school and arts organization partnerships.