The UChicago Charter School Donoghue Campus has won a competitive grant for the second year in a row from the Ingenuity Creative Schools Fund! The grant provides Donoghue with the opportunity to continue its partnership with Design Dance, a community-based organization that specializes in fostering students’ social-emotional development through dance education. 

This past summer, Ingenuity conducted a study in partnership with the UChicago Consortium on School Research that found that arts education can play a critical role students’ social-emotional development. Based on this research, Design Dance has developed a cultural dance curriculum that Donoghue will implement in preK, kindergarten, and first-grade classrooms this spring. The collaboration between Donoghue’s teachers and Design Dance’s instructors will culminate in an eight-week program that aims to expose our scholars to movement that will increase self-confidence, foster empathy, build communication skills, and ultimately improve academic performance.