What Is VAPA?
VAPA stands for Visual and Performing Arts and refers to programs in California public schools that includes classes in music, theatre, media arts, and visual arts. VAPA programs are held to Common Core standards that are organized around five artistic disciplines while also supporting students' art experiences.
UC-approved high school courses
One yearlong course of visual and performing arts chosen from the following disciplines: dance, music, theater, visual arts or interdisciplinary arts — or two one-semester courses from the same discipline is also acceptable.
An excerpt from the article, "The Mind-Expanding Value of Arts Education," published in The New York Times.
It is largely through the arts that we as humans understand our own history, from a cave painting in Indonesia thought to be 45,000 years old to “The Tale of Genji,” a book that’s often called the world’s first novel, written by an 11th-century Japanese woman, Murasaki Shikibu; from the art of Michelangelo and Picasso to the music of Mozart and Miriam Makeba and Taylor Swift.
“The arts are one of the fundamental ways that we try to make sense of the world,” said Brian Kisida, an assistant professor at the University of Missouri’s Truman School of Public Affairs and a co-director of the National Endowment for the Arts-sponsored Arts, Humanities & Civic Engagement Lab. “People use the arts to offer a critical perspective of their exploration of the human condition, and that’s what the root of education is in some ways.”
Mrs. Servanda and her daughter.
Department Chair
Mrs. Servanda has served as the department chair since 2022 and has been dedicated to enhancing arts instruction at Kennedy High School. Her knowledge and passion has helped our students in all the VAPA programs succeed.