Summertime and all its wide-open joy brings opportunities for something different, something more.

LINC’s partnership with Kansas City Young Audiences — a staple of LINC’s after-school programming during the fall and spring — can really stretch during June and July.

KCYA’s summer camps, which offer one free scholarship each to any LINC student, are a special opportunity, said Marty Arvizu, KCYA’s director of marketing and business development.

KCYA camp signup

Go to KCYA.org

LINC students use code LINC2023 for one free camp. Availability may be limited.

Camps run through Aug. 5

“The camp experience goes in depth,” she said, “to help kids find their voice.”

The weekly camps, which run into early August, include a lot of the artistic expression that LINC families recognize from the after-school programming at LINC’s Caring Communities sites:

Visual arts . . . music . . . theater . . . dance . . .

But instead of a 45-minute class, the camps run from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. at KCYA’s facility at 3732 Main Street in Kansas City.

LINC has teamed up with KCYA since 2009 to bring its teaching artists into schools to provide free classes for the same reason that KCYA is giving LINC children free access to its summer camps.

“We want to remove all the barriers” that might stand between children and the power of art, Arvizu said. “We’re all in this together.”

In one recent week of camp, Friday’s showcases presented children who created fanciful face masks, performed story-telling folk tunes, and who had written, casted, practiced and ultimately performed a theater play.

The camp is led by artists from the same fleet of talent that visits LINC’s programs during the regular school year.

The in-school classes are designed with an eye toward matching and enhancing the curriculum in both the school and after-school programs, Arvizu said. The classes aim to bring children into the arts wherever they might be in their growth, and enrich the classroom’s education, culture and behavior.

The excitement in the LINC students during KCYA programs in after-school time is telling, said Sean Akridge, LINC’s Caring Communities Administrator.

“If parents come early to pick their kids up, the kids say they want their parents to wait until it’s over,” Akridge said.

The children are getting a taste of what’s possible in their lives that they might not otherwise have gotten, he said.

“They get something they can connect to,” he said, “something they can own and integrate into who they are.”

In 2018, KCYA and LINC stepped up their collaboration, joining together to provide professional development to LINC’s Caring Communities coordinators and teaching staff to learn ways to make the arts a deep part of the day-to-day activities before and after school.

KCYA has created art kits with guides for teachers to lead sessions on their own, all in the mission of finding more ways “to engage kids in art,” Arvizu said.

One example Akridge notes is the work KCYA teaching artist Sean Layne did to help LINC teachers open program sessions by using Layne’s Actor’s Tool Kit — an experience set to music with reflective thought.

The list of KCYA workshops available to be brought into LINC’s program numbers more than 100, with creative adventures including New World Music Gumbo, Songs of the Americas, STEM and arts integration, the Urban Bucket Brigade Boot Camp and Biome Boogie: Dances for Planet Earth — just to name a few.

“All students learn differently,” Akridge said, and the LINC and KCYA partnership wants “to find ways to reach every one.”

By Joe Robertson/LINC Writer