Frank Caracciolo: It’s just so much fun to to do this job, and a lot of fun with working with the people and so like you say, it’s hardly work.

The paperwork gets to me a bit, and, oh, everybody knows me in meetings, but to be honest, just to be able to strengthen the the arts programs within our schools and support so many great teachers who are out there doing theatre, music, dance. Of course, the visual arts been a great pleasure and honor for me so, let’s just keep it going as we we go forward, I have… I’d love to just say a quick hello and shout out to the MAD2* DEEN Committee who we are meeting this week, I guess at the… I don’t guess, I know… at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, our colleagues there have put together a nice program. We’re going to be meeting with some of the people at the museum. We have a little workshop there, and again, we’d like to extend that to our teachers as well to get out there, and go see the museums and take your students to these cultural places, we have wonderful cultural places and institutions in Montreal, and people should get out there. The teachers could use that as a classroom—coming from New York, they have a a program called City as School, where they use the they use the city as their classroom, and so this is kind of a concept that I like very much and would love to see more happening like that.

We have so many great programs going on. I gotta… also one of my favorite stopovers always, at Horizon High School, just to see the students at Horizon, the teachers at Horizon, my friend Myron Weeks, Ben Matlin, and I mean everybody who’s there has been wonderful to me but the EdVenture program has been a really great program over there and with the work that they do there with some of the students, it’s just been amazing and it always fills my heart up when I go there to work with the the students there. So shout out to to my friends over at EdVenture.

There’s just so many people to thank and talk about and I think I’ve said it like 3 times already, but I’m currently working with the artist Beverly Landry, who most of you might have known from the Pearson News and there was a a video I believe made on Beverly early on in the year, that was great, but I’m working right now helping to finish up a mural at the Beaconsfield High School Arts Wing, and it’s coming along really fabulous, and it’s almost done and I hope to see it finished before the end of June. And we’re working hard. I’m going to be there tomorrow working on that mural and I look forward to everybody seeing that. So another great effort and so many great murals this year, which I think is becoming a great part of our school system. Montreal is one of the best mural cities I’ve ever seen in my travels, and it’s just everywhere you go, you find a mural that you’ve never seen before, and I have actually have personal friends who are working on murals as I speak out there in the city.

And then, of course, our giant Leonard Cohen mural kind of anchors us now in downtown Montreal. But in the smaller communities, if you travel through LaSalle, Lachine, you go to downtown areas, you go in the West Island, and you’re going to see great murals and they’re going to continue, and I think this is becoming a real trend in our school system is having murals created by teachers, by artists with student help. And they, you know, they’re there to make their mark and to last—and to say something. So we’re really excited about that.

So with that, I’d like to, you know, talk about a little bit about the programs that I’d like to see in the future happening. I’d like to see more of an art school where we really focus on the arts. I’d like to be in the course of developing something like that and also, you know like more I know I’ve spoken to the principal over at Horizon High School, principal Matlin, and we’re talking about creating an art studio within the school so that students could utilize that studio like an artist and we could have artists, guest artists, come in to work and talk about process and techniques.

So these are kinds of things that I’m interested in.

I’m also looking, in the fall, to do a little PD for teachers on creating creative classrooms and some initiatives to help teachers utilize the arts in their their classroom strategies, as well as integrating again into their curriculum. So I’m I’m looking forward to that. I’m looking forward to so many things. I’ve always full of ideas….

Listen to the entire episode on Spotify here:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/4LJxogGpEcZqopelH3UBUa

…or on Apple Podcasts here:
https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-blank-canvas-season-5-ep-8-being-frank/id1548791725?i=1000712193118