SMARTS, Students Motivated by the Arts, is celebrating our 28th year in the community as a leader in arts education. Since the pandemic, we have experienced continued growth in our free Public Programming offered at SMARTS and throughout the region in our Community Programming with our partner schools and youth organizations. New students apply daily for our free classes and we continue to add new teachers and offerings in visual arts, music, dance, theater, and creative writing for PK-12 students.

There are thousands of students in the Mahoning Valley who do not have access to dance, theater, and creative writing during the school day and schools often provide only the minimum offerings of visual art and music. We know that many disadvantaged students learn better in the arts, and many SMARTS students live at or below poverty; without SMARTS, most of these students would not have access to quality arts learning. Because of your support, SMARTS can cut all barriers to quality arts education by providing students with our free Public Programming and the necessary supplies, including use of SMARTS instruments if they don't have their own.

We have >3,000 PK-12 students in our database who want to take classes with this number growing daily. Our student application is open year-round—in fact, 500 students have joined in the past year. In 2023-24, we served more than 11,000 students, artists, teachers, administrators, and families through a combination of Public and Community programming. We are on track to meet the same goal this year, working with more than 25 community partners and since the fall, we have offered 66 Public classes that have served over 2,500 students—with much more programming still to come in our summer workshops, which will take place this June-July.

We can’t do this without you!  With your support, SMARTS will continue to provide free classes for every child in the Mahoning Valley.