{"id":278060,"date":"2026-09-03T10:12:07","date_gmt":"2026-09-03T10:12:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/278060\/"},"modified":"2026-09-03T10:12:07","modified_gmt":"2026-09-03T10:12:07","slug":"philadelphia-leader-for-arts-in-schools-charts-new-course","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/278060\/","title":{"rendered":"Philadelphia leader for arts in schools charts new course"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>From Philly and the Pa. suburbs to South Jersey and Delaware, what would you like WHYY News to cover? <a href=\"#Section1\">Let us know!<\/a>\n<\/p>\n<p>The Philadelphia Arts and Education Partnership has a new executive director, who is facing a new landscape for funding teaching artists.\n<\/p>\n<p>Anjoli Santiago has taken the helm of PAEP just as a state program dedicated to teaching artists has been eliminated. Last year, the PA Council on the Arts rebranded itself as PA Creative Industries and streamlined most of its grant divisions into a single program, cutting the program specifically for Arts in Education.\n<\/p>\n<p>PA Creative Industries has also discontinued its regional partnership program, which relied on local coordinating organizations to foster grants. PAEP was the PCI\u2019s Philadelphia partner for teaching artists. Santiago said that partnership represented about half of PAEP\u2019s operation.\n  <\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt is a big piece of the pie,\u201d she said. \u201cIt is also not just the funding, but it is the loss of trust in what arts education could do and the impact that it has for our society.\u201d\n<\/p>\n<p>Before her promotion, Santiago had been PAEP\u2019s program director since February 2025. She has had a lengthy career as an arts administrator, including stints at Classroom Champions and the Philadelphia Theatre Company.\n<\/p>\n<p>Beyond her day job, she is a performer, writer and teaching artist. Santiago has had gigs with the now defunct Amaryllis Theater, Power Street Theater, WHYY on its podcast<a href=\"https:\/\/whyy.org\/episodes\/the-philosophy-of-water\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\"> \u201cPhiladelphia Revealed<\/a>,\u201d and even with the<a href=\"https:\/\/www.fws.gov\/event\/writing-nature-anjoli-santiago-1\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\"> U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service<\/a>, teaching a nature writing workshop at the John Heinz Wildlife Preserve at Tinicum.\n<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI just stretched a BA from Temple theater as far as I could,\u201d she said.\n<\/p>\n<p>Leveraging the arts in STEM subjects<\/p>\n<p>The PAEP is a non-profit that supports arts education in schools, typically with teaching artists, and encourages schools to incorporate the arts into other school curricula, including science, technology and math.\n<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI see it being cushioned through the framework of design thinking: Try, try again,\u201d Santiago said. \u201cIt is the same road map as the scientific method, which is the same road map as creativity in writing a poem, in writing a play, in creating a sculpture with your hands and creating music beats. There is always a revision process. True in science, true in the arts.\u201d\n        <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"From Philly and the Pa. suburbs to South Jersey and Delaware, what would you like WHYY News to&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":278061,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[107926,32726,223,69,116436,71,70,23941],"class_list":["post-278060","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-arts-education","tag-arts-funding","tag-pennsylvania-education","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-arts-in-education-partnership","tag-philadelphia-headlines","tag-philadelphia-news","tag-philadelphia-schools"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278060","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=278060"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278060\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/278061"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=278060"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=278060"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=278060"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}