During the summer of 2006 I participated in a tour of Tacoma School of the Arts, or SOTA, and every classroom beckoned. I marveled at how different my teen-age life would have been if this school had existed then.



Now my daughter is a SOTA student. Some days I wish I could go. Unfortunately, neither the school nor my daughter would really be OK with that, but I recently learned by reading SOTA’s weekly newsletter that I’m not the only parent who feels a tiny bit envious of their SOTA child. Always looking for ways to serve their community, Metro Parks and Tacoma School of the Arts have teamed up to offer adult evening classes at SOTA.



The classes offered this fall include set design, collage, art journal making, printmaking, pottery, alternative photography, flamenco dance, breakdancing, creative movement, contemporary dance, vintage/musical jazz dance, beginning ballet/historical connections, fused glass, hand embroidered greeting cards, mixed media drawing and songwriting/audio recording.



“In the fall of 2004 Metro Parks Tacoma approached SOTA’s founder and co-director, Jon Ketler, about forming a partnership in order to expand the Metro Parks’ arts programs and offer them in an existing arts facility,” says Melissa Moffett, community developer for Tacoma School of the Arts. “Ketler agreed to the partnership on the condition that courses for the greater community be of the same quality as those taught to SOTA students.”



Moffett was hired in spring of 2005 to facilitate both the Metro Parks Community Arts Program and the Adjunct Artist Program at SOTA. She explains that adjunct artists are professional, working artists who work alongside SOTA arts instructors to teach one or two classes per semester. She says they provide more in-depth knowledge and real-world experiences for students.



Maintaining the high quality teaching standards for the program is not difficult because SOTA is a natural draw for artists who consider teaching in their areas of expertise. Moffitt says over the past three years quite a few artists have provided their resumes, work samples and course proposals. Some of these artists are hired as adjunct artists for SOTA, some become arts instructors for Metro Parks courses and some do both.



Moffitt says the most popular classes in the Metro Parks Community Arts Program are dance (of all types), pottery, fused glass, glassblowing, painting, and drawing.



“We have high hopes for the printmaking classes since this genre is becoming evermore present and appreciated in Tacoma thanks to groups such as Beautiful Angle and King’s Books,” says Moffitt.



Moffitt would also like to remind people that it’s safe to go downtown.



“SOTA’s 450 students cross downtown multiple times each day without incident,” she explains. “We have access to local police, the Business Improvement Area (BIA) security and UWT security. Reports on crime in the downtown area, given at the Downtown Merchants Group meetings, show very few incidents occurring in this area. 



For more information, or to register online, visit www.metroparkstacoma.org.