By Sahara Lyon-Mundy
May marks the last month of the 2024-2025 academic year for Leon County students, and schools all over Tallahassee are hosting events to celebrate. At Kate Sullivan Elementary, art teacher Emily Westfall-Crouch is continuing a long tradition of the school’s end of year Art Festival. The festival, normally held every year around early to mid-May, was canceled last year due to the May 10th tornadoes; because of last year’s cancelation, students are even more excited for the festival to return this year.
Westfall-Crouch has been teaching at Kate Sullivan for over a decade, and she’s been organizing and hosting the Art Festival during her entire tenure at the school. However, she was not the teacher who first came up with the idea, despite making it her own over the past eleven years. The Art Festival was first proposed and organized by long-time Kate Sullivan art teacher Evelyn Pender. Pender planned and hosted the Art Festival for over 30 years during her time at the school. When Westfall-Crouch was a student at Kate Sullivan, Pender was her art teacher. This made the experience of running the festival extra special. While Westfall-Crouch has worked to uphold the primary intent of the original festival, she is still making it her own.
As part of changing the framework Pender first established, from year to year, Westfall-Crouch worked to introduce new exciting elements into the festival. The core of the festival has remained the same, with students rotating through art stations, including painting, tie-dying, sculpture making, crafting, chalk drawing, and more. Westfall-Crouch commented, “I definitely keep some stations from year to year because they are a hit, but every year I try and make half of the stations new to keep the festival fresh.”
This year, Westfall-Crouch is excited to make the Art Festival more interdisciplinary. She invited the Raa Middle School dancers to host a dance workshop, to teach the elementary students different moves and dance with them throughout the day. Raa band members will provide music throughout the morning, and Kate Sullivan students, under the baton of music teacher Sharon Tacot. plan to play a mini concert later in the day. In addition, members of Cobb Middle School’s Junior Beta Club will serve as volunteers for the day, manning various art stations and helping the festival run smoothly.
For Westfall-Crouch, the annual Art Festival is really important because it provides uninhibited and accessible fun, to celebrate the end of the school year. She stated, “Many kids don’t get the opportunity to go to festivals with their families. This gives them a chance to do it during school.” She continued, “the festival is a really nice send off to summer. We have the music going, and it really caps the end of the year off on such a positive note.”
Westfall-Crouch knows that, beyond just the Art Festival, arts education is extremely important, because it provides the foundation that sets students up for success. She continues, “arts education exposes everyone to the arts at a young age, and they can start to develop a love for the arts.” Westfall-Crouch, an FY25 Arts Education Round Two Grantee, understands the importance of access in the classroom. Her grant paid for Deep Space Sparkle curriculum, an online curriculum that has an extensive database of lesson plans that are all state standard-driven and easy for the students to follow. Westfall-Crouch explained that the Deep Space Sparkle curriculum is so helpful for her because it streamlines what she does in the classroom and saves her time, freeing her up to this of new ideas and develop more creative lessons and projects for her classroom. She stated, “I’m looking forward to having another resource in my back pocket.”
COCA will be assisting Westfall-Crouch on the execution of the Kate Sullivan Art Festival, helping run various stations, offering arts education resources, and creating a summer camp listing sheet for the students to take home to their parents. We’re so glad the Art Fest is back again!
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