Red Lake Middle School students in D.C. with Citizen Cope

WASHINGTON D.C. - Twelve students from Red Lake Middle School were in D.C. with Citizen Cope for a long weekend of music making and sightseeing.

Red Lake Middle School is one of the President's Committee's new Turnaround Arts schools. Citizen Cope aka Clarence Greenwood is the Turnaround Artist mentor for the school and invited the students to D.C. over the weekend when he was going to be performing there.

Turnaround Arts, a program of the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, empowers high-need schools with arts resources, art, music, theater and/or dance programs, music instruments, and arts integration across subject areas as a strategy to address broader school challenges and turn around struggling schools.

The students have their first ever music program and music teacher this year thanks in part to the Turnaround Arts partnership. For this trip they have made their own drums to perform with Citizen Cope for their part in a special project that will release worldwide later this spring and go to his concert in D.C. last Friday at the Lincoln Theatre.