SOAR Palmdale, a college-ready high school known for its rigorous academic focus, recently broke new ground by hosting its first-ever Arts and Humanities Day, giving students an opportunity to showcase their creative talents alongside their scholarly achievements.

The event featured 22 separate workshops spanning visual arts, performing arts, and film, with students selecting five sessions throughout the day. Activities ranged from painting and museum displays to drama, poetry, music production, dance, and filmmaking workshops. For the first time, the school’s dance team also performed for the entire student body.

Creating Space for Creative Expression

Elisa Frias, an English teacher with 22 years of experience, organized the ambitious event after recognizing an unmet need on campus. “There’s a lot of creativity here at SOAR Palmdale, and it seemed like there weren’t enough outlets for students to express themselves, so I wanted to give them a forum to be the amazing, impressive, creative people that they are,” Frias explained.

The initiative challenges the notion that arts should take a backseat to academics. “Art is important, art is something that we shouldn’t set aside and think that it’s not essential,” Frias emphasized. “It’s essential to being a human being and to expressing yourself and to making way for new ideas in the world.”

Students Shine Through Personal Expression

Senior Aliya Russell embraced the day’s offerings with enthusiasm, participating in multiple workshops and creating both poetry and visual art. “I’ve always loved humanities, I love art, I love speech, I love dance, I love everything, so I wanted to be as active as possible,” Russell said. “It’s not just because like I need to, it’s because I just really want to, it’s something I’m passionate about.”

Russell’s poetry analysis explored themes of displacement and land theft, drawing connections between historical events and current global crises in Sudan and Gaza. Her visual art piece, titled “Me Yalo Matua” in Fijian, honored her late father. The manta ray design incorporated traditional Fijian patterns, symbolizing wisdom, spirituality, and guidance. “I know he’s guiding me through heaven,” Russell shared.

Unexpected Discoveries in the Humanities

Eleventh-grader Rafael Nochez and his co-founder Jerome developed a nonprofit business proposal addressing homelessness in the Antelope Valley, discovering a passion for humanities work despite considering himself “more of a STEM major.”

Their research revealed a 42% increase in homelessness over the past year. The team took their own photographs and videos along Sierra Highway and Lancaster Boulevard to document the crisis firsthand. “It was raining, it was freezing out there,” Nochez recalled. “We really wanted to show our audience and our investors that this is a real problem.”

The students’ nonprofit operates under the slogan: “We aid in what we can and refer in what we can’t to people who can.” Their proposed initiatives include soup kitchens, food drives, and hygiene supply distributions, acknowledging both their passion for helping and their realistic limitations as high school students.

A Successful Start

Early feedback from the inaugural Arts and Humanities Day has been overwhelmingly positive, suggesting that SOAR Palmdale has successfully expanded its mission to nurture well-rounded students who excel both academically and creatively. The event demonstrated that even in a college-focused environment, there’s room—and necessity—for artistic expression and humanitarian thinking.

If you are interested in registering your student, visit SOAR’s application link.