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

Last updated: July 3, 2026

If your child is struggling academically, most schools follow a predictable playbook: shrink the art program, cut music hours, and strip everything that isn’t the skill that’s failing. That instinct is understandable. It is also backwards. Georgia’s Department of Education handed its 2026 Creative School Arts Integration School of Excellence Award to five public schools, including Adairsville High School in Bartow County, which embedded theatre, music, visual arts, media production, and esports across every academic subject. The award matters not because arts are nice to have, but because what those five schools built is precisely what the science says struggling learners need: instruction that engages multiple brain systems at once.

TL;DR

Georgia's DOE awarded its 2026 Creative School Arts Integration School of Excellence honor to five public schools, including Adairsville High School, which embedded theatre, music, visual arts, media production, and esports into academic instruction schoolwide.

The IDA's 2025 definition of dyslexia moved explicitly to a multi-system causation model, recognizing genetic, neurobiological, and environmental factors beyond phonological processing alone.

Orton-Gillingham and structured literacy interventions are built on multisensory instruction, the same multi-channel engagement principle that arts integration applies across subjects.

Neuroscience research identifies impairments in multisensory integration as a measured pathway to reading difficulty, meaning arts-rich environments are not incidental to struggling learners but structurally relevant.

The most common school response to falling grades, cutting arts to focus on a single skill, removes the multi-system input that many struggling learners need most.

Georgia’s recognition of arts-integrated schools opens an important question for every parent of a struggling learner: what kind of instruction environment does your child’s brain actually need? Here are the questions parents most often ask.

Common questions

Does arts integration actually help kids who struggle with reading?

Research on multisensory instruction, the approach behind Orton-Gillingham and other evidence-based reading programs, consistently shows that engaging visual, auditory, and kinesthetic channels at once strengthens the neural pathways reading depends on. Arts integration applies the same multi-system principle schoolwide. It is not a replacement for targeted reading intervention when a child needs it, but for learners whose brains depend on multiple input channels, arts-integrated environments produce engagement and retention that single-channel drill often does not.

My child’s school cut art and music to focus on reading scores. Was that the right call?

It is the most common response, and the research suggests it is often the wrong one for struggling learners. Multi-system processing research shows that children who have difficulty with reading frequently have challenges that extend across auditory, visual, and working memory systems. Instruction that engages only one of those systems, and removes the arts and movement that engage the others, narrows the learning pathways instead of expanding them. Ask your school whether there are multi-sensory elements in your child’s literacy intervention, not phonics drills alone.

What is the Creative School Arts Integration School of Excellence Award?

It is a recognition given by the Georgia Department of Education to public K-12 schools that have successfully embedded arts across their curriculum as an instructional approach, not a standalone class. Schools are evaluated on arts integration throughout subject instruction, teacher collaboration, professional development, program organization, and community involvement. In 2026, five Georgia schools received the award, including Adairsville High School in Bartow County.

How do I find out if my child’s learning challenges go beyond phonics?

If your child has had phonics instruction and is still struggling, the gap is often in one of the other systems reading depends on: auditory processing, visual processing, working memory, or processing speed. A multi-system screener helps identify which systems are the actual bottleneck so intervention targets the right thing. 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.

Georgia awarded schools for arts integration. Cutting the arts when grades slip is the most common school response for struggling learners. The science says it removes exactly what those brains need most. Tweet Now Follow Learning Success

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.

What the coverage gets wrong

Most reporting on arts integration treats it as an enrichment story: feel-good recognition for schools going above and beyond the basics. That frame misses the mechanism. The research on multisensory instruction, the same research Orton-Gillingham is built on, shows that engaging multiple brain systems simultaneously is not a luxury for learners who already read well. For children whose reading difficulty traces to impairments in auditory, visual, or cross-sensory processing, multi-channel instruction is structural, not supplemental. Framing arts integration as enrichment implies it is optional. For a significant share of struggling learners, the peer-reviewed evidence says it is load-bearing.

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.

Key Takeaways:

Georgia awarded five public schools for embedding arts across all subjects in 2026: Adairsville High School in Bartow County was among the 2026 Creative School Arts Integration Schools of Excellence, recognized for theatre, music, visual arts, media production, and esports embedded throughout academic instruction, not as a standalone class.

The science of reading has always been multi-system, and arts integration engages those systems: The IDA's 2025 definition update moved to a multi-system causation model for reading difficulty. Orton-Gillingham, the evidence-based gold standard for struggling readers, is built on the same multisensory principle arts integration applies schoolwide: auditory, visual, and kinesthetic channels engaged simultaneously.

Cutting arts when grades fall strips the multi-system input struggling learners need most: Peer-reviewed neuroscience research identifies impairments in multisensory integration as measurable pathways to reading difficulty. Instruction that removes auditory, kinesthetic, and visual engagement narrows the available learning pathways for the children who most need them broadened.

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.

Your child’s brain is not fighting the basics. It is looking for every available channel to build what won’t come easily, and an instinct that keeps removing those channels in the name of ‘focus’ is the obstacle. Arts integration, multisensory environments, and instruction that engages the whole learner are not extras. They are the infrastructure struggling learners need, and the schools Georgia honored this year built it. If you’re ready to understand which specific processing systems your child needs support in, the Learning Success All Access program gives you a roadmap built on the same multi-system science those award-winning schools put into practice. Start here.