Transcript of Interview with Staff from Wave Hill

Noah Baen: I hear, time and time again from parents, that we’re giving these kids something that they’re not getting in their school experience, that there just isn’t room in a school now for the kind of open-ended, really creatively oriented arts program, sometimes not any arts programming at all, with, you know, kind of the emphasis on testing and basic skills that are dominating the school experience. But our goal and our function here is to really broaden their perspective, to put imagination and creativity in the forefront, and to allow children and adults to understand that those things—the imagination and creativity-- are kind of essential elements in engaging and thinking about the world, and making who you are and making how you approach the world and how you pursue your life.

Jo Reed: Wave Hill also creates school-based arts education programs in partnership with both private and public schools. 

Claudia Bonn: The education program at Wave Hill is very key to what we offer our community. We have partnerships with local and public schools throughout the Bronx. Hundreds and hundreds of schoolchildren come here every year to visit the grounds. We have a variety of different programs in which we work with public schoolteachers and also private schoolteachers. Any school in the area can partner with Wave Hill. We will work with teachers. We come right into the classroom. Our education department did create a play about the Hudson River that helped teach the children what the Hudson River was all about, in honor of the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson sailing up the river. So we do create school-based programs for children as a way of teaching them about the river, teaching them about the garden, teaching them about honeybees, teaching them about trees and pollination. So we try to reach young children through our theater-based program.