The comprehensive art and music curriculum offered in all grades in Paterson Public Schools enriches the lives of the students and their families through exposure to the arts during their educational journey.  Students interested in honing these skills are offered the ability to apply to both a specialized fine and performing arts elementary school and high school.  Additional opportunities, such as El Sistema and weekly visits from Sharon Miller’s Academy for Performing Arts are underway this year. 

Arts education is an essential part of school curriculum and life. In a purely educational sense, the arts are important to education reform and give meaning to the cognitive, psychomotor, kinesthetic, and affective domains of learning. The arts specialist establishes a hallmark of quality learning that will continue to enhance the academic, social, cultural, and behavioral development of the student throughout adult life.

There are five units to assist arts educators in implementing the New Jersey Core Curriculum Content Standard for the visual and performing arts, including dance, music, theatre, and visual art.

We believe that:

• The arts, engages all explicit learning in analyzing , reasoning, problem solving, higher-order thinking, articulating, and synthesizing within a continuum of flexibility, persistence, collaboration, and cooperation to accomplish a common goal, valued by reformers in both the education and business communities.
• Through the arts, lives and communities are changed; diversity is accepted and encouraged as students learn to study and play together so that as adults, they will garner the same respect in work and life.
• Music, dance, theatre, visual arts, and media arts, allow students to become part of the human heritage of creating, producing, and responding.
• Education can no longer be defined without the arts. Participation demonstrates infinite knowledge building strategies that are systemic and unique to the learner and a necessary part of 21st century skills in a changing global society.