Evry Mann, far left, founder and director of the Center for Creative Education, teaches a percussion class. Photo: Celia Watson Seupel

KINGSTON, N.Y. — The new kid didn’t know he was supposed to hold the drumsticks backward, but he had no trouble keeping the beat.

Percussion with Evry Mann, founder of the Center for Creative Education based at 20 Thomas St., teaches essential skills for success in school. Only the kids don’t know it. They think they’re just having fun.

“Listening, cooperation, showing up, paying attention, teamwork,” said Mann. “We teach these without naming them. If I stood up in front of a blackboard talking about team work, they’d all be gone.” The center, a nonprofit founded by Mann in 1989, offers classes in dance and drumming for children aged 5 to 18 and adults. The Thomas Street location also houses a homework room, a kitchen, a computer lab and a recording studio.

“I’ve learned so much here,” said Nichole Naccarato, a 17-year-old Kingston High School student and a member of the center’s Energy Elite dance troupe. “Respect. Responsibility. We’re like a family.”

At a time when the New York State Education Department is threatening to shut down Kingston High School for failure to improve achievement for African-American students and students with disabilities, according to a state Education Department report, the district’s alliance with the Center for Creative Education may represent one encouraging avenue for change.

During the past two years, the district partnered with the center to work with eighth-graders who had attendance problems. “I believe it turned some kids around,” said Nicole Andrews, the center’s administrative director. “They still come and hang out here. They could have hit the ground running, but they come back.”

In 2011, the center will partner with the district in a broader program to offer enrichment programs to Kingston High School students in the newly renovated Carnegie library building. The city’s Board of Education building, which has been vacant for more than 30 years and is next to the high school, will house a new arts and technology center.  Renovations are slated to begin Aug. 18 and to be completed by the beginning of the 2011-2012 school year.

Planning for the Carnegie building includes the center’s participation in project-based learning for high school students as well as after-school arts programs, according to Mann.

“We know a lot more about how kids learn now,” said Mann, referencing William Butler Yeats’ quotation, “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.”

“Our kids are stuck in fill-a-bucket mode,” said Mann.

Naccarato, about to enter her senior year at Kingston High School, echoes that sentiment.  “I wouldn’t say there’s much creativity,” she said about her classes. “It can be kind of boring. It’s mostly taking notes off the board.”

This model of teaching, in which the instructor lectures and students take notes, lacks a sense of relevancy or opportunity for individualized learning and is one aspect of Kingston High School’s education that was criticized by the state in its recent report.

Darrell Herry, 17, a drummer at the center who will be a Kingston High School senior this fall, talked about some of the racial tension at school. “Some of the African-American kids are too stubborn. They won’t open themselves up.” Henry, who teaches younger children at the center, talked about the good teachers at the high school.  “I may have been hardheaded at first, but now I’m open to everything.”

The multigenerational cycle of poverty, Mann insisted, can be broken. “We have this incredible resource. Young, creative, incredible kids we’re just squandering. The arts can be a lifeline.”

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