East and West come together in schools

By Andrea Chevalier and Lucy Lopez
Bengal News Reporters 
           This is a tale of two high schools.
           Both work with teenage students who have similar stories, likes, dislikes and problems. What separates the two is geography and race.
           The Ferry Street Corridor Project uses art and history to help unify these high schools and the communities around them. The project is a set of after-school programs  in Lafayette High School on the West Side and the Buffalo Academy for Visual and Performing Arts on the East Side that is using art to find common ground between the two communities. One program is run by Friends of the Buffalo Story, and the other by the Anne Frank Project at SUNY Buffalo State. 
           Through the project students from both schools have the opportunity to learn about the history of the city they live in while giving back to the community. 
           “They are doing art-related and theatrical-related story gathering right now,” said Cassie Lipsitz, lead art teacher at Lafayette High School. “They develop ideas and concepts for art, and they are making a logo, and they also participate in community-building theatre activities. The Anne Frank Project is working on that with them. The idea is that the students at Lafayette will work with the students from Performing Arts. There is a gap that we know exists in the City of Buffalo between the East and the West Side. Ferry Street is the corridor that would satisfy that.”
          Friends of the Buffalo Story, which is just one of the partners involved in the project, is a program that was created in order to bring the people of Buffalo closer to the roots and history of the city. Through citizen-based programing, Friends of the Buffalo Story hope to open the eyes of the people in the community to the history of Buffalo.
          “(A group of people) realized that there was a need for some group to kind of represent the heritage of Buffalo,” said Marissa Lehner, project manager of the Ferry Street Corridor Project. “Since they’ve formed themselves, they’ve been around for about a year-and-a-half, now two years, where they’ve held various types of programming.” 
          Lehner, Annette Daniels-Taylor and Barrett Gordon run one of the after-school programs, where they work to get to know the school, the students and their needs. Daniels-Taylor works on the East Side while Gordon, who also runs the WASH Project, works with the school on the West Side.      
          “These kids matter and it is really important for them to realize that,” Lehner said. “ (We hope to) teach students a different curriculum based on public art — trying to help the students understand that art can be out in the community. Dialog can be art.”
     


       In the other program, teaming up with Drew Kahn and Eve Everette of the Anne Frank Project, the Ferry Street Corridor Project has started work with both schools to focus on community building, something the Anne Frank Project is known for.
            “Buffalo is a town that has celebrated refugees and its immigrants – the Italians, the Polish, the Germans – for years,” Kahn said. “Now we’re celebrating the Bhutanese, the Congolese, the Burmese, the Iraqi; all of these great new communities and great new stories coming in that will make Buffalo’s new singular story.” 
             The support that the Ferry Street Corridor Project receives from the community and local political leaders helps it grow.  Buffalo artists are involved with helping the students create art works and Mayor Byron Brown has also shown his approval for the goals of the project’s mission. An “Our Town” grant from the National Endowment for the Arts funds the project. 
           The project began on Oct. 28. For the first 15 weeks, the students will focus on gathering stories. In the spring, they will start putting public art pieces together. 
           “At this point, we definitely want to find a way to make this sustainable,” Lehner said. “Ferry Street just has so much history and relevance for Buffalo. It really can tell a very broad story but also with a lot of great details. Ferry Street was technically part of the Underground Railroad and they are a lot of great stories to be told.”