Arts In Upper School
In Upper School, the arts become a space for students to develop a genuine point of view.
Theatre, music, broadcasting, design, and digital arts are not survey courses — they are studios where students make real creative decisions, take on real creative risks, and discover what they are capable of when given the tools and the room to explore. Across every discipline, the goal is the same: students who leave not just with a skill, but with the confidence to use it.
Theatre Arts
Theatre Arts at Summit asks students to do something genuinely challenging: step fully inside someone else's perspective and make it believable. Working in both the 300-seat Loma Hopkins Theatre and our intimate 75-seat Black Box, upper school students experiment with the full range of performance craft — body language, vocal choices, facial expression — learning to communicate story not through words alone but through presence. Drama studio begins in Fourth Grade, giving students a foundation that deepens with every year. The result is not just stronger performers, but students who have practiced empathy, inhabited complexity, and learned to hold an audience's attention.
Chorus
Chorus at Summit is where individual voice meets collective sound. Students develop music literacy through a range of techniques — solfege, improvisation, theory games — while learning what it means to truly listen to the singers around them and adjust, blend, and contribute to something unified. The ensemble experience builds musical skill and genuine confidence in equal measure, giving students the experience of being heard as part of something larger than themselves.
Instrumental Music
Instrumental Music at Summit is designed around a simple idea: every student is a musician, regardless of where they are starting. The program offers a wide range of instruments and settings, welcoming students who already play as well as those picking up guitar, keyboards, bass, or percussion for the first time. Students learn to collaborate, to follow and to lead, and to perform as a team — experiencing music not as a solo pursuit but as a shared creative act. The rotating structure ensures that every student encounters music in multiple contexts, building both versatility and a lasting appetite for playing.
Broadcasting — VoxComm
VoxComm is Summit's broadcasting program, and its driving purpose is captured in three words: find your voice. Students examine how audio and video combine to deliver a message, analyze real advertising and media examples, and then produce their own — including a 90-second media package, a 30-second public service announcement for Screamin' Eagle Radio, and an original podcast. The work is hands-on and the stakes are real: students are creating content for actual audiences. In the process, they develop the storytelling instincts, media literacy, and communication confidence that matter in virtually every path forward.
Design
In Upper School Design, students move from learning the design process to owning it. Using 3D printers, laser cutters, SketchUp, and other professional-grade tools, they take ideas from concept to physical reality — developing precision, problem-solving, and an eye for how form and function relate. Students explore architecture and monuments to understand how design principles operate at every scale, from an object in your hand to a building that shapes a city. The Design Studio serves students in Fifth Grade and above and regularly connects to curriculum across math, science, and engineering, making it one of the most genuinely interdisciplinary spaces on campus.
Digital Arts
Digital Arts gives students a hands-on introduction to music creation through technology — and, in doing so, opens a door many students didn't know existed. Using MIDI instruments and music software, students explore rhythm, melody, chords, and song structure, building comfort with the tools that working musicians and producers use every day. The program moves from foundational skills — the major scale, chord building, simple melodies — toward full song construction, with students learning to recognize and create the elements of chorus, verse, bridge, and beyond. By the time they finish, students have not only an appreciation for how music is made but also the beginnings of the ability to make it themselves.