The Creative Advantage, a Seattle Public Schools arts program, expands to ...

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"All students in all schools should have the opportunity to learn through the arts."

That's the lofty goal of Seattle Public Schools' Creative Advantage program, which was launched in 2013 at 13 schools and has since expanded to 81, affecting more than 55,000 students, per a press release.

The program, a collaboration between Seattle Public Schools, the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, the Seattle Foundation, and more than 100 community artists, cultural groups, and arts organizations, was born out of a 2012 needs assessment that found race and ethnicity were the greatest predictors of whether a student had access to an arts education, as well as the "same structures that prevent low-income students of color from receiving an arts education also disadvantage teaching artists of color," per the press release.

The study found that 40% of K-3 students in Seattle received no arts instruction from a qualified arts teacher, per the Seattle Times.

Since its launch, more than 5,000 elementary school students have been able to access music classes that wouldn't have been available otherwise; the number of elementary and K-8 schools offering both music and visual arts classes has more than doubled; the number of visual and performing arts teachers has grown from 190 to 268; and the number of schools offering both music and visual arts classes has

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