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St. James students to travel to DC

Staff photo by Connor Cummiskey Four students from St. James’ Northside Elementary will perform Sunday in Washington D.C. for the Kennedy Center Turnaround Arts Talent Show. Pictured left to right: Principal Doug Storbeck, Ellie Stordalen, Danon Sawatzky, Keeley Runge, Ethan Leimer and Music Teacher Cathy Bruce.

ST. JAMES — Four students from Northside Elementary in St. James are going to Washington, D.C., this weekend.

Fifth-graders Keeley Runge, Ellie Stordalen, Danon Sawatzky and Ethan Leimer are flying to the capitol with their music teacher Cathy Bruce, to be part of a Turnaround Arts talent show in the Kennedy Center Sunday.

The show includes 10 students from Minneapolis, Red Lake and St. James, to perform alongside three Turnaround artist mentors.

“The performance itself will probably be four or five minutes long, along with a song by Citizen Cope and dance moves with Lil’ Buck, and then the drumming is with Mike Arturi,” Principal Doug Storbeck said.

Turnaround Arts is a national program founded in 2011 to help boost school quality and performance by integrating art into the classroom.

“Since becoming a Turnaround Arts school, Northside Elementary has went from being identified as a ‘priority’ school (lowest 15 percent in the state) to a ‘celebration’ school,” Storbeck said in a press release. “In 2013, less than 50 percent of the students at Northside met state standards in math and reading. In 2017, the percentage of students meeting state standards in both math and reading was just below 70 percent.”

Northside joined the program four years ago. This will be the second time it sends students to the Kennedy Center for the talent show.

Part of the program is providing supplies and professional development for teachers to integrate art into their classrooms.

“It is beyond just doing art projects,” Storbeck said. “We already had music, we already had art as a part of our daily routine in all of our grade-levels, but by adding Turnaround Arts, it really brought a sense of artful thinking into the classroom.”

Storbeck said visual thinking strategies that help students analyze and pick out key elements in visual art can be applied to multiple curricula.

Each school is paired with a professional artist. Turnaround artists include high profile names like Whoopi Goldberg and Elton John.

Larramie “Doc” Shaw is an actor who adopted Northside as his Turnaround Arts school. Shaw is an actor who has performed in multiple Disney channel shows.

He won a Young Artist Award in 2009 for Best Supporting Performance in a TV Series after playing Malik Payne in Tyler Perry’s“House of Payne.”

Shaw will not be participating in this talent show. Instead students will perform with professional drummer Arturi, Charles “Lil’ Buck” Riley who danced with cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and Americana musician Clarence Greenwood a.k.a. Citizen Cope.

The school currently has a fundraiser on gofundme.com to raise money for the cost of travel. As of Thursday afternoon they had raised $1,375 of their $3,200 goal. To contribute, go to gofundme.com and search Northside Students (Talent Show).

Connor Cummiskey can be emailed at ccummiskey@nujournal.com.

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