RAMAPO, NY — Grace VandeWaal, winner of America's Got Talent and the 2017 Radio Disney Music Award for Best New Artist, is helping to fund an elementary school show choir in the East Ramapo district. Funding for the choir will be donated by VanderWaal and matched with state funds secured by NYS Senator David Carlucci. The arts initiative was announced by East Ramapo Superintendent Deborah Wortham in her Tuesday morning video message.

She was joined in her office by VanderWaal and her mom, who are Suffern residents, Carlucci, and Michael Smith, Director of Fine & Performing Arts. "Starting this choir will expose so many students to an opportunity that they may not have had without it," Dr. Wortham said. "Our students are passionate about the arts and we are excited to have another way for them to excel. Grace's continued involvement in our community is inspirational and I can't wait to join her for the first concert and the choirs' renditions of her music."

The choir will start with auditions for current fourth- and fifth-graders entering fifth and sixth grades. Those students selected will participate in a workshop over the summer and begin to participate in competitive events starting in the new school year.

"East Ramapo students are lucky to have Grace VanderWaal as a role model for them and helping make this new choir a reality," added Carlucci (D-Rockland/Wastchester). "After many students had limited opportunities like this a few years ago due to budget constraints, it is an honor and a privilege to be able to create another way to enrich what goes on in the classrooms. This would not have been possible without the creativity of Grace and Dr. Wortham and I am thankful for their collaboration to get this choir going."

Music and art programs had been eliminated by the East Ramapo Board of Education in 2012. The district has been embroiled in financial controversy in recent years, much of it fueled by the gap between the public-school community, largely poor and black, and the local Hasidic community, whose representatives control the school board. The district, which includes parts of the communities of New City, Pearl River, Nanuet, Spring Valley, Suffern, New Hempstead, Chestnut Ridge, Monsey and Wesley Hills, has 9,000 students in its schools. However, another 24,000 school-age children live there, and go to private schools—mostly yeshivas. State-appointed fiscal monitor Hank Greenberg called for intervention in his 2014 report, East Ramapo: A School District in Crisis.

