The Polk County High School Fine Arts Department has been awarded a $10,000 Unrestricted grant from the Polk County Community Foundation. The grant paid for an artist-in-residence, a choreographer, who taught 16 weeks of tap dancing lessons to interested high school students; a digital recorder that will be used by both the concert band and chorus to record concerts and individual performances; and 25 new lighting instruments for the stage.

Both the students and the community will benefit greatly from the grant. We have been using the original lighting fixtures that were installed in the auditorium when it was first built nineteen years ago. Its truly a credit to Richard Halls ingenuity that any of them are still functioning. With the purchase of the new instruments, we are able to more efficiently light the stage utilizing 2/3 less energy. The lights burn cooler and so the ambient temperature will not be impacted as greatly as the older instruments. The new Source Fours will also allow for greater creativity in lighting schemes for plays, talent shows, and other community events, explained Donna Everett, theater arts teacher at the high school.

The digital recorder will enable students to record both concerts and individual performances. Students seeking music scholarships to universities are often required to submit a CD of a solo performance. Recordings of full orchestral performances are also required to complete applications submitted for certain adjudications. Until now, the school did not have the ability to do such recording. The digital recorder allows recording of both choral and orchestral performances on 16 tracks. The tracks can be mastered on the recorder and then burned directly to CDs.

The new lighting was featured at the recent Miss PCHS Pageant. The PCCF Unrestricted Grant purchase of the lighting instruments allowed the student lighting technician to run a variety of lighting washes for each segment of the pageant.