Children's Theatre
4015 Red Bank Road
Cincinnati, OH 45227
Mainstage Season 2021-2022 - School Underwriting Program
Grant Application:
The Children’s Theatre of Cincinnati (TCT) is pleased to submit this application to the Charles H. Dater Foundation to extend its MainStage Series sponsorship of TCT’s 2021-2022 season at the Taft Theatre. This generous funding will support school ticket subsidies for TCT’s four MainStage productions. The upcoming season includes a Disney favorite and world-premiere “Descendants The Musical”; a holiday classic “Elf The Musical JR.”; the musical adaptation of Roald Dahl’s beloved novel “Matilda The Musical JR.”; and the Broadway gem “The Wiz Junior”. Throughout the upcoming season, TCT’s MainStage programming will serve more than 100,000 families with children, students, and members of the Greater Cincinnati community. The 2021-2022 season marks TCT’s 102nd year of producing artistically engaging and thoughtful productions for families of all ages. TCT is the oldest professional children’s theatre in the nation and the only professional theater in the region that devotes its entire MainStage season to children.
TCT’s goals for the 2021-22 season were to 1) secure funding for schools in financial need to attend a performance by TCT and 2) keep admission prices as low as possible for all other schools. It costs TCT $25/student to present Broadway-quality, professional theatre, but it is our goal that no school ever pays more than $8.
Grant Evaluation Report:
There are so many benefits for both children and the community to providing theatrical experiences starting at a young age. Studies show that engaging children in the arts (theatre, in particular) leads to better school performance and improved creative thinking and problem-solving skills. Children who are exposed to live theatre are also better able to imagine successful futures for themselves, having seen perseverance and triumph modeled on the stage (Wolf Brown 2019). Theatre can also be a tool for exposing young audiences to different cultures, ideas and backgrounds. The empathy they learn by experiencing other points of view through characters on the stage results in more respectful and inclusive community members down the road.
Furthermore, the benefits of a return to live performances cannot be underestimated. Many educators are seeing a huge impact on students in the wake of COVID-19. Children are lacking many social competencies they would typically learn and develop at school and are struggling to adapt appropriately to various classroom and social settings. Additionally, teachers at all grade levels are noticing lower academic achievement due to the pandemic. Studies show that on average, current K-12 students are an average of 4 months behind in reading by the end of the school year, and students in low-income schools show 7 months of unfinished learning (McKinsey & Co. 2021). However, studies from the Dept. of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas show that “seeing live theatre offers significant educational benefits to school-age children, including a stronger command of the plot and vocabulary of those plays”. Also, students who receive arts field trips show greater gains on standardized test scores for Math and ELA (National Endowment for the Arts 2019). TCT hopes that the live theatre experiences provided by this grant have helped mitigate post-pandemic learning loss and benefit the social emotional learning for the students that attended our productions. In this respect, we feel that TCT met, if not exceeded, our objectives for this initiative.
Although the season got off to a rocky start, our attendance numbers show that comfort levels with public gatherings increased over the course of the season—and transportation barriers for schools seemingly decreased—resulting in significantly increased attendance for the final show in our season. We believe this indicates a return to pre-pandemic attendance numbers in the coming season, and we look forward to hosting more children for performances at the Taft Theatre than we have in years.
Website:
http://www.thechildrenstheatre.com Amount: $50,000
Date: September 2021
