When Grades Slip, Schools Cut Arts. Georgia Is Rewarding Schools That Don’t.

What Georgia recognized and why it is significant

Adairsville High School received the 2026 Creative School Arts Integration School of Excellence Award from the Georgia Department of Education, one of five public K-12 schools statewide to earn the honor. It was the school’s first submission for the award, and the first year the school shifted its designation from STEM to STEAM. The four other honorees were Baggett Elementary (Gwinnett County), Springdale Park Elementary (Atlanta Public Schools), West Jackson Elementary (Jackson County), and Wynnton Arts Academy (Muscogee County). Together they represent a cross-section of Georgia public schools, from elementary through high school, that have made arts integration a schoolwide instructional approach rather than a standalone class.

At Adairsville, students combine artistic processes with academic learning through programs in theatre, music, visual arts, media production, esports, and interdisciplinary projects. The award criteria go beyond the arts program itself: Georgia evaluates schools on the depth of arts integration throughout subject instruction, teacher collaboration and professional learning, program organization, and community involvement. Principal Tony Stanfill noted the win was a surprise for a first-year submission.

Why the science says this is not enrichment, it is instruction

The mainstream take on arts integration is that it is enrichment: something schools add when everything else is working and cut when the pressure is on. That framing has it backwards, and the science of reading makes the case. Reading does not happen in a single system. It requires language processing, auditory discrimination, visual tracking, working memory, and processing speed to coordinate in real time. When one of those systems lags, the whole act of reading stalls. The International Dyslexia Association’s 2025 definition update moved away from the old single-cause phonological-processing model and explicitly recognized multi-system causation in reading difficulty, encompassing genetic, neurobiological, and environmental factors. That is not a new idea in cognitive science. It is, however, an idea that the ‘strip to basics’ instinct in struggling classrooms actively works against.

The gold-standard intervention for students who struggle with reading, Orton-Gillingham, is built entirely on multisensory instruction: seeing, hearing, saying, and moving at the same time. The reason is not aesthetic. Multisensory engagement gives the brain multiple simultaneous routes to encode a skill, which matters most when one route is unreliable. Research on multisensory integration published in peer-reviewed neuroscience literature has consistently found that impairments of cross-sensory processing are among the measurable pathways to reading difficulty. Arts integration at a school like Adairsville does something structurally similar across every subject: it adds the auditory, kinesthetic, visual, and spatial channels that single-mode direct instruction leaves unused. The real obstacle when struggling learners fall behind is not effort or intelligence. It is a mismatch between the instruction format and the processing systems the child is actually using to learn.

Cognitive scientists Maryanne Wolf and Mark Seidenberg have both documented that reading is not a natural act: the brain repurposes circuits built for other functions, including auditory, visual, and spatial processing, to acquire a skill it never evolved for. That repurposing is more reliable when those circuits are engaged, not sidelined. Schools that respond to failing grades by pulling the arts and movement from struggling learners’ days are, in practice, narrowing the available pathways instead of broadening them.

What this means for your child and what to ask the school

If your child is struggling with reading or attention, the question to ask is not only which reading program the school uses. It is also how many brain systems that program engages. A child who finds traction through movement, sound, or visual patterns is not being difficult. Her brain is doing something predictable: seeking the strongest available signal. Arts-integrated instruction gives that brain more signal routes. It does not replace targeted reading intervention when a child needs it, but it changes the conditions in which intervention lands.

When evaluating what your child’s school offers, look for instruction that layers input across channels: visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and narrative together. Ask whether the school’s response to falling grades has been to add multi-sensory elements or to strip them. Ask whether movement, music, and art are embedded in instruction or kept separate as rewards for finished work. Those are the environments where struggling learners often find the traction that eludes them in single-channel instruction. And if you are not sure which specific processing systems are the actual bottleneck for your child, a multi-system screener is a useful starting point before committing to any one intervention. A screener is a starting point, not a diagnosis. If your child might need formal accommodations such as an IEP or 504 plan, or you suspect a vision, hearing, or medical cause, a professional evaluation is the route to those supports.