LIBERTY — Students within Liberty Local School District will have the chance to immerse themselves further in the arts, thanks to an agreement with a community art school.

The district’s board of education approved entering a $85,332 agreement with Students Motivated by the Arts (SMARTS) at a regular meeting last week to provide K-12 art classes and teachers in visual art, music, dance, theater and creative writing.

The services will include arts integration, after-school activities, art in non-arts spaces and family nights, as well as SMARTS Beats / Empowers for students with special needs, according to Liberty Superintendent Brian Knight.

The programs will supplement existing programs within the district and will not displace any staff, Knight said.

Knight explained the agreement with SMARTS expands on a preexisting one that started two years ago, when he took over as the district’s high school principal.

“We do a variety of things with them. We do a dance at our elementary school, a dance class and at the high school, they support our drama program,” Knight said. “And we also have a show choir program that they support as well, and they just incorporate multiple things in the classroom as far as programming for kids and just general outside the box-type thinking.”

Knight said they have art in “uncommon places”, setting up for SMARTS performers at lunch or throughout the day and having choir singers or musicians come in and play for their students.

Having SMARTS representatives do such things allows the district to gauge student interest in the performance process and allows them to love the arts outside of a traditional art or music classroom, Knight added.

In an era where students and academics as a whole have progressively strayed further away from the arts in favor of more STEM-oriented fields, the one-on-one talks with performers and the chance to understand their thought process and emotions while performing is part of what makes the arts programs great, Knight said.

“First of all, they do develop a love of the arts programs and it makes them think outside the box. The other piece is, I think it helps them with social, emotional pieces — it helps to build confidence,” Knight said. “It gathers the interest, they have the opportunity to talk one-on-one sometimes with the performers and get an understanding of what they did and how they did it.”

Knight said they’ve attempted to further the arts in their schools as much as possible outside of SMARTS’s involvement. The district’s choir sang

“The Star-Spangled Banner” this year, something that used to be exclusive to their band kids.

Knight said they were lucky to have high school arts teacher Sarah Frank, whom he credited with looking for ideas outside of the traditional arts formats.

SMARTS President Becky Keck was not available for comment.