About
Our Vision
Theater making will be among measures of literacy and academic achievement for all children grades three through six in order for them to succeed in tomorrow’s world of innovation.
Our Mission
To improve the educational success of children, grades three through six, by using theatre making during the school day as a method of personalizing and embodying educational content across the curriculum.
Our History
Sixteen years ago, Stages of Learning, was born from an idea that schools needed drama instructors and under-utilized actors were abundant in New York City. At the time, we knew from experience that some children liked to act out characters from books and plays, but we didn’t know why.
By 2001, seven years after our first teaching artist residencies in three pilot schools, we began to notice that not all 1,102 students in the program were fully engaged in acting out their characters.
We were seeing the most engagement from kids in grades three through seven but we didn’t have a cogent understanding of that, either. Enter nationally known researcher, Jane Remer, who facilitated a four-year study from 2001-2004 that enabled us to answer essential questions that provided an evidentiary basis for subsequent program activity, including the development of some of the best and the brightest teaching artists in the field through the Niko Elmaleh Institute for Teaching Artist Development in association with Long Island University.
2004 marked the end of the study and the beginning of another special endeavor. It was the year that we received a three-year, $650,000 capacity-building grant from The Jenesis Group, a leadership funder since 1999. The aim of this plan was to increase capacity in programs, administration, and leadership and governance.
At the conclusion of three-years of capacity-building, the instructional and professional development programs were recognized for excellence among peer organizations, funders, schools, communities, and even Mayor Bloomberg. While we were proud of this accomplishment, it was also clear that we had the same number of board members in 2007 that we had in 2004, administrative costs were escalating, and potential funding organizations, like the Center for Arts Education (Annenberg), were beginning to contract.
We began to ask ourselves How do we sustain an A+ program amid a C- institution? and shifted our thinking away from institution-building toward alternative strategies to stabilize the core program. By October 2007, we were looking at innovative solutions to ensure mission-driven sustainability in an intensely competitive environment for small nonprofits. Conversations commenced with possible strategic partners until March 2008 when the boards of Stages of Learning and Queens Theatre in the Park approved the idea of a merger.
The wisdom of a merger became tangible when, two months later in December 2007, the world entered the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. After nearly two and a half years of strategic collaboration with Queens Theatre in the Park and despite one of the highest school enrollments in the history of the organization, it was becoming clear in 2009 that economic realities were exacerbating cultural differences and a full merger would not be possible. Integrating the Stages of Learning program just couldn’t become a priority for Queens Theatre in the Park during so troubling a time.
Stages of Learning leadership began to plan its graceful exit. “We don’t want to jump the shark,” said founder Floyd Rumohr, referencing an idiom originating from a 1977 episode of Happy Days when the show took a severe downturn from its previous quality. “The work in the classroom would suffer too much and our children deserve better than that. Education, and especially arts education, has never been a societal priority and after sixteen years we no longer believe that the environment can support an organization solely focused on restoring drama instruction to the students of New York City.”
Although the organization filed for dissolution in 2010, it is important to reflect on a gratifying reality: the organization began in 1994 with $5,576 in income. In 2008, it approached an annual budget of nearly $1m – a testament to the hundreds of remarkable supporters who supported the moral imperative of restoring rigorous drama to the school day for students who otherwise would never act out archetypes of Heroes, Warriors, Villains, Champions, and others that teach us important life lessons.
Thank you to the classroom teachers, teaching artists, administrators, donors, board members, and ultimately the nearly 40,000 students who have been its heartbeat. It is there, in them, and in us, where the idea will continue to live on.
For more information: