The Art and Science of Radio with KCRW’s Frances Anderton
As part of our fifteenth anniversary celebration and as an outgrowth of previous student work on “New Roads Radio”, New Roads is partnering with KCRW’s Frances Anderton, producer of “Which Way, LA” and “To the Point” with Warren Olney, and co-producer/host of “DnA, Design and Architecture”, to offer “The Art and Science of Radio” to high school students beginning in January, 2010. Utilizing Frances’s years of experience with print and broadcast journalism, students will explore the narrative and technical aspects of radio journalism as well as its relationship to other forms of investigation and story-telling in order to produce their own broadcasts. With the offices of KCRW just around the corner, students will be able to see the skills they are learning applied in a real-world setting and increase their connection to this wonderful community resource.
Brave New Foundation Partnership
New Roads is in the process of developing a media literacy and ethics program in collaboration with Brave New Educators, a project of Culver City-based Brave New Foundation and Brave New Films. Brave New Educators makes film footage and content generated by Brave New Films available for students to study, analyze and remix, as a way to spark civic engagement and motivate social change. The program debuted this year at The University of Southern California and Occidental College. New Roads will adapt the program and develop curriculum appropriate for high school students. This exciting collaboration is led by teacher Ronan Hallowell who will offer a “Media Literacy/Ethics” class for the first time in the fall of 2010. The synergy of New Roads’ diverse and dynamic learning environment with the content and expertise of the Brave New Foundation, will provide students a unique set of tools for examining the role and responsibility of media in framing, addressing, and ameliorating the myriad social problems facing our world today.
The Conlon Collection, New Roads School, and the Herb Alpert Educational Village
New Roads School has been selected by Maestro James Conlon, Los Angeles Opera’s Richard Seaver Music Director, to curate, digitally-catalog, and make available to the public Conlon’s extensive personal music collection consisting largely of original recordings by people who perished in the Holocaust. The audio collection of almost 2,000 recordings will be housed in the Herb Alpert Educational Village, which includes New Roads School, and will be overseen by Conlon and New Roads’ School’s award-winning Music Director and acclaimed composer, Michael Abels.
Conlon selected New Roads School as his partner in this unique venture because of its much lauded music program, the school’s unwavering commitment to diversity, and the exceptional opportunity for community collaboration presented by the Herb Alpert Educational Village. “I wanted to donate this body of work to an educational institution because students should absolutely experience it first hand,” notes Conlon. “New Roads School within the Educational Village will provide that accessibility for students, teachers and the entire L.A. community.”
The digital cataloging has been done by student intern, Cody Del Rosario. Cody is a wonderfully hard-working junior who earned top grades last year in his elective classes, Introduction to Creating Music and Sound Recording and Engineering. When he is not pursuing his academic and musical studies, Cody participates in an extracurricular rowing team and is a certified Junior Lifeguard.
The Spectrum Program in the Community
For the past five years, The Spectrum Program has been a provider of services, through the California Regional Center system, for students diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). In addition to our school-year program supporting New Roads students with ASD, the Spectrum Program welcomes students from the community at large in our summer recreational and job-internship programs plus an after-school performing arts program. Over the past several years, Spectrum has hosted student interns from UCLA and other area schools, several of whom have generated graduate-level research based upon their work with Spectrum students. We currently are working with UCLA Extension towards providing internship/student-teaching hours for students seeking special education credentials.