All through her life, Dr. Denise Davis-Cotton, former principal and founder of the public magnet high school Detroit School of Arts, has been surrounded by great men and women.

Raised during the civil rights, segregation and forced integration era in Montgomery, Alabama, Davis-Cotton knew Rosa Parks, a neighbor and friend of the family. 

“She and my grandmother walked to work and rode the bus, and my aunt and Rosa Parks were [also] friends,” Davis-Cotton says. Meanwhile, civil rights leader Doris Crenshaw, future founder and CEO of The Southern Youth Leadership Development Institute, babysat Davis-Cotton, providing inspiration.

Davis-Cotton’s teachers did the same. “I love the fact that I grew up in an era where teachers were almost the center of the community—where everybody loved and revered and respected them,” Davis-Cotton says.

Those formative educators are why Davis-Cotton is adamant about integrating art into learning. After 18 years at Detroit School of Arts (famous alums include pop singer Aaliyah and Tony Award-winning actress Celia Keenan-Bolger), she moved to Florida, planning to retire. But, in 2017, she saw an opening for the director of the Florida Center for Partnerships in Arts-Integrated Teaching (PAInT) at the University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee (USF-SM) and couldn't resist getting back to work. It felt like a continuation of the work she’d done at the Detroit school.

She was hired and immediately began making connections with local arts groups through PAInT and bringing the arts to students and educators in K-12 schools across Sarasota and Manatee school districts. The arts, she says, open the doors to successful learning, especially for difficult subjects, like mathematics and physics. Ensuring that creative disciplines are accessible to students from all socioeconomic backgrounds, particularly low-income students who don’t typically have easy access to the arts, is essential, she says.

For example, the PAInT program took students to the circus, where students saw how artists’ performance skills could be applied to science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics. Acrobatics was used to illustrate physics. The circus even provided lessons in financial literacy as teachers discussed the budget side of the business.

Today, the PAInT program, for which Davis-Cotton is both a classroom professor and a resource for educators who want to incorporate arts-integrated curriculums into their classrooms, has impacted students from California to Florida. More than 100 educators in Florida have used the program. And, since 2017, PAInT has served more than 5,000 students, both at USF Sarasota-Manatee and in underserved school districts. The PAInT Scholars Program has connected USF-SM education majors to arts organizations such as Venice Theater and The Bishop Museum of Science and Nature.

In the wake of the dissolution of the USF-SM’s campus and its absorption into New College of Florida, Davis-Cotton says that the PAInT program will be moving to USF’s Tampa campus and is adamant that the work will not stop in the Sarasota and Manatee districts.

Her ultimate goal is to ensure students anywhere in the world are able to tap into PAInT’s resources.

“We believe that arts integration is not a luxury,” Davis-Cotton says. “PAInT's mission is to ensure that no student's zip code determines whether creativity is part of their education.”