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Dance. Move. Engage. Integrate.

Dance. Move. Engage. Integrate.

SF Loves Learning Begins Its Third Season

SF Ballet’s Dance in Schools and Communities (DISC) program airs for a third season on KQED’s SF Loves Learning, helping to narrow the digital divide for school children.

Since April 2020, SF Ballet has partnered with San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) and KTVU Plus to create SF Loves Learning, an educational television program created specifically for Pre-Kindergarten through 2nd grade students and their families who have struggled adjusting to distance learning. Every episode of the daily TV show includes an interactive dance or music lesson, taught by DISC Teaching Artists, that aligns with the show’s weekly curricular themes as well as its broader goal of providing culturally relevant, anti-racist, and bilingual-bicultural instruction to students across the Bay Area. SF Ballet is proud to be the only arts organization that SFUSD is partnering with to create the TV series. The television program reached over 113,000 schoolchildren and Bay Area households during the Fall 2020 semester, and KTVU Plus has renewed the show through the end of this school year in June 2021.

SF Loves Learning
SF Loves Learning Nutcracker
SF Loves Learning Kyra Katagi
SF Loves Learning Manolo Davila and Jessica Recinos
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Dance. Move. Engage. Integrate.

These are the four pillars of SF Ballet’s DISC education programs for Pre-Kindergarten through 12th grade schoolchildren.

A core arts education program, DISC has been providing free dance classes for students in SFUSD for over 40 years. SF Ballet’s team of professional Teaching Artists lead weekly dance classes for SFUSD students that support the core curriculum and share the joy of dance. Pre-pandemic, the DISC residency program served over 3,000 PreK-12 students at 47 public schools in San Francisco each year. On March 6, 2020, only days before shelter-in-place began, SF Ballet performed a Student Matinee of Act I of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to a sold out house of over 2,500 elementary students. That evening, COVID-19 changed everything.

Learn More About DISC

Dance, move, engage, and integrate have taken on new meaning as kids continue distance learning and schools remain closed due to COVID-19. DISC continues to inspire creativity and enrich learning through virtual dance classes on Zoom and an educational television series on KTVU Plus called SF Loves Learning.

SF parent Latoya Pitcher and her four-year-old son Levi are devoted fans of SF Loves Learning, as reported by The New York Times. Levi loves to sing its daily goodbye song along with the SFUSD Superintendent Dr. Vincent Matthews. The one time Ms. Pitcher forgot to turn on the program, she said, “Levi asked, ‘Mommy, what happened to my friend?’ They have Dora and ‘Blues Blues’ and all that, but this is people,” Ms. Pitcher said. “That’s what they lost with shelter-in-place: seeing people every day.”


Acknowledging the unprecedented impact of COVID-19 and the current social climate, SF Ballet’s DISC education programs continue to pivot with purpose in this new educational landscape while also ensuring that children have opportunities to be creative, active, and engaged during these challenging times.

Tune in every weekday from 8:30–9 AM on KTVU Plus or anytime online on the SFUSD’s website.

Header Image: Child participating in a dance class through the KTVU television show SF Loves Learning // © SF Ballet