During the school year, high school students from across Philadelphia gather at PAFA for college-level art classes. They learn figure drawing, traditional painting, and illustration from PAFA Painting Department chair Al Gury and his team of MFA students who are budding art teachers.

“We started with 12 students from one school and I don’t think anyone expected it to live but it has. It has grown tremendously,” said Gury, adding that the After-School Studio Arts Program for High School Students now educates between 200 and 300 high-schoolers each year.

The program, which has been running for more than 20 years, is completely free to students. David Wilson, the program coordinator, says the weekly classes are often the only art education opportunities some public school students have.

“A lot of the public schools are deficient when it comes to art education so we give them an opportunity to come in and learn,” he said.

Wilson and Gury reach out to every public, private, parochial, and charter school in the city. They’re not only creating an environment to learn art but for students of all backgrounds to cross paths and come together.

“It’s very multicultural, very diverse, every kind of background you can imagine,” Gury said. “It’s a pretty stimulating environment because the students all meet each other and they’re together in a wonderful environment. I’d like to think it helps to give them focus in their life.”

Four weekly classes are offered: Foundation Drawing, Oil Painting, Introduction to Illustration and Comics, and Life Drawing and Anatomy. Students are encouraged to take as many classes as they’d like. About a dozen students each year take all four classes, with several young people studying at PAFA all four years of high school.

“At this age, they learn really, really, quickly. They pick things up really fast, like impressively fast,” Wilson said. “They’ll come in at the beginning of the year and not be able to do anything and then you’ll check back in a couple of months later and it’s like, ‘Wow!’”

The program is entirely funded through donations and grants from organizations like The Brook J. Lenfest Foundation, the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, and the W. Percy Simpson Trust.

Classes are taught by PAFA’s MFA students, with support from Gury and Wilson. Just as the high school students are learning to become artists, the after-school high school program is teaching PAFA students to become educators.

Wilson (MFA ’10) says he came to PAFA for his Master’s in part because of this program.

“There’s not really any other school who has a program like this and most art schools don’t offer much in the way of teaching experience,” he said. “You’re lucky if you can be a teaching assistant, which is like a glorified monitor for a class.”

The hands-on teaching experience is invaluable for MFA students as they embark on their professional teaching careers. Several PAFA graduates have secured teaching positions after leading classes in the after-school program.

“It’s a great opportunity because it’s free for the kids and our students get an experience actually teaching, actually spending time in front of a class, with a class that’s not here to judge,” Wilson said. “They’re getting free classes so they’re happy just to be here, it's beneficial for everybody.”

To reach more students, PAFA provides SEPTA tokens to students at Kensington High School for the Creative and Performing Arts so they can travel to Center City at no cost and take classes.

Gury hopes to see the program expand beyond PAFA’s campus, and reach more high school students.

“It was designed as a model program because when we started no one did anything like this. Even today no one really does anything like this,” Gury said. “There’s a lot of Saturday programs or tuition bearing things for high school kids but this is a college level free program they can participate in. It’s a totally different kind of thing.”