All Marquis Studios programs are designed to meet the needs of the particular schools, classrooms, and students in which they run; this includes the extra services required for special needs classrooms. All Marquis Studios artists are trained to work in special needs classrooms, and these classes can be included with their general-education peers in all residencies we offer to community schools. During the pre-planning that precedes each residency, teaching artists will ask about any special needs modifications to lessons plans that would benefit your students, and work to tailor curricula for Inclusion and CCT classrooms.

Marquis Studios is also proud to offer arts programming to District 75 schools – in fact, a full 25% of the work we do in New York’s public schools each year is with students in these high-needs classroom. In this section of our website you will find a menu of programs designed with District 75 in mind. Regardless of the population served by a particular school, be they visually impaired, physically disabled, or affected by neurological disabilities such as Down’s Syndrome or Autism, Marquis Studios has artists on our roster who are fully prepared to teach your students. As our mission states, we believe that the arts are key to making learning a positive experience for every child, and there is no group of students for whom this is more true than students with disabilities: it would be our pleasure to provide your students with new opportunities for communication, expression, and engagement with teachers and peers in an academic environment.

Finally, in collaboration with PS 37 in Staten Island and the Center for Arts Education, Marquis Studios runs an annual program called the Teaching Artists Training Institute (TATI) which trains arts educators to work with students on the Autistic Spectrum. This growing population of students is poised to become a real challenge to the city’s educators of all sorts, and we are pleased to report that the TATI program, which provides intensive, hands-on training seminars and workshops at PS 37 will enter its fourth year in the fall of 2010. For more information in TATI, please see the dedicated page linked on the left.