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Fine Arts
Music
Charlottesville City Schools lays a strong musical foundation in our elementary schools, where children sing and play instruments regularly. In the elementary schools, students take music class once and generally offer winter and spring concerts. The students also perform in the community.
Beginning in fifth grade, many students elect to join the band, choir, or orchestra. Charlottesville City Schools has an extraordinarily strong record of excellence in these groups. Some of our middle- and high-school performing groups have not received less than a superior rating (the highest possible) since the 1980s! In 2023, the Virginia Music Educators’ Association named CHS a Blue Ribbon School for the 13th time when it earned a superior ranking in the school’s top group for band, choir, and orchestra. In 2023-24, the CHS band was invited to perform in Rome at the New Year’s parade, and the orchestra accepted invitations to perform across Ireland. Each spring, the CHS band, choir, and orchestra join forces for a special symphony concert. Charlottesville’s music program is regularly cited as exemplary, and its graduates perform professionally around the world.
Theater & Dance
Theater productions, often combined with music and dance, are a vital part of elementary education and occur frequently in all the elementary schools.
CMS provides a full year course of theater as well an after-school enrichment program. CMS Theatre attends the Virginia Theatre Association festival and performs around the community.
TheatreCHS offers a host of opportunities for thespians, whether students wish to take theater classes or participate as an extracurricular activity. The CHS theater program participates in Virginia High School League competitions such as one-act performances and various design and costuming challenges. Besides major productions, theater students enjoy performing for their peers and teachers, at the elementary schools, and at their annual student-directed Dessert Theater. The season’s highlight is the spring musical, which delights crowds in the Martin Luther King Performing Arts Center.
Visual Arts
All elementary students take art, taught by an art specialist, at least once a week. At the upper elementary and middle school levels, students may choose art as a full-year course. At the high school, there are numerous levels and options offered each semester, including Fundamentals of Art, Studio Art, Photography, and AP Portfolio Art classes. Field trips to museums and galleries, along with frequent artists-in-residence, supplement the schools’ visual arts programs by giving students the opportunity to observe, work with, and learn from professional artists.
Our students’ excellence in the arts is shown in their regional and national recognition. In recent years at Charlottesville Middle School and Charlottesville High School, students have won Gold Key awards through the Scholastic Art Awards, with their work exhibited at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
Reflections
Reflections is a Summer Regional Governor’s School Program, funded in part by the Virginia Department of Education with local financial and in-kind support. The Reflections Program is a 10-day summer program for middle school students gifted in the visual arts, competitively selected from Charlottesville City, Albemarle, Greene, and Nelson Counties, and the private and home-schooled students in the region.
Literature & Creative Writing
Charlottesville City Schools nurtures young writers through language arts, and CHS offers both English and creative writing classes. Our school division is a founding partner with the Virginia Festival of the Book, which brings guest authors to all of our schools each spring. Our students participate in writing competitions such as the Writer’s Eye contest sponsored by the Fralin Museum at University of Virginia, and more. Additionally, Charlottesville City Schools produces the Unfinished Jigsaw, a division-wide anthology of student art and writing.
Annual Anthology: The Unfinished Jigsaw
Each year, teachers at each school help collect samples of student writing for the publication, and art teachers at each school select student works to complement the literary pieces.
In 1979-80 the first edition of The Unfinished Jigsaw was published to showcase the literary talents of students from Charlottesville City Schools. It began as the final product of a poet-in-residence program led by Jason Bell.
Forty years later, this wonderful anthology seems as much a part of the spring for the city schools as blooming dogwoods, baseball practice, spring concerts, and the prom. The title for the publication came from the initial poem in the first issue containing the phrase, “my field [referring to the dimensions of her life] is an unfinished jigsaw puzzle with its missing pieces in sight, but out of reach.” (Karen Davis, CHS 1979). Another quote from the preface in the first issue states, “To read The Unfinished Jigsaw with an eye for perfection is to miss its significance. The value of the work lies in the students’ realization of their unique personal experiences and in the discovery of a medium for its expression.” (Stacy Boyle, Fine Arts Coordinator, 1979).
Since then, Charlottesville City Schools expanded the publication to include student produced visual art in addition to literary work. Over the years this effort has involved thousands of students and hundreds of teachers and administrators. None of it would have been possible without a supportive School Board and Superintendent. There are many people to thank for the commitment over the years to producing.
The Unfinished Jigsaw is, in many ways, the signature of Charlottesville City Schools. Through this anthology, one can feel the excitement of students who are developing and becoming comfortable with their language and other abilities to give expression to their own ideas and imaginations. We invite you to hear their voices and find a piece of your own humanity reflected in their stories and expressions.
Previous Years
The Unfinished Jigsaw is an anthology of literary and art work by students in Charlottesville City Schools