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FOUR SPECIAL ED STUDENTS TO TAKE STAGE AT WASHINGTON'S KENNEDY CENTER

March 20, 2000

One of the nation's most vocal proponents of arts education as both outlet and therapy for students with special needs is giving four such students a chance to display their skills on a national stage. VSA arts is sponsoring its annual Panasonic VSA arts Young Soloists Evening at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, in Washington, D.C., to celebrate the accomplishments of saxophonist Alex Han, vocalist Beth Gray, pianist Tse-Chen Hsu and violinist Yana Sedyakina. The four, recipients of this year's Panasonic and Rosemary Kennedy VSA Young Soloists Awards, are scheduled to perform March 29.

Han, a 12-year-old with Attention Deficit Disorder, learned to play the recorder when he was 7 and shifted to the saxophone at 8. The Kennedy Center will not be his first night on a major national stage, however. Han, a New Jersey native, has performed with Grammy Award-winning artist Paquito D'Rivera at New York's Lincoln Center. Gray, a 19-year-old singer from Arkansas with Optic Nerve Hypoplasia, is now a sophomore at Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia, Ark. She is majoring in choral music education and hopes to become either a professional musician or an elementary music teacher.

Hsu , who is blind, will be traveling from his native Taiwan. The 12-year-old first started learning the piano at age 3, when he received an electric piano as a gift. He started formal piano lessons at 8 and, as his talent began to show, was moved from a national school for the blind to a regular elementary school with a well-regarded music department. Sedyakina, who has scoliosis, comes from Russia, where she has won numerous awards and international music competitions. The 18-year-old is studying at the St. Petersburg Conservatory's Music College.

The VSA arts Young Soloists Evening will be introduced by 1995 Miss America Heather Whitestone McCallum, the first woman with a disability to win the national beauty pageant. Since that time, Whitestone has founded the STARs program, which stands for Success Through Action and Realization of your dreams, to motivate people to overcome obstacles to reach their goals.

The event is free and open to the public. VSA arts, founded in 1974 by Jean Kennedy Smith, promotes artistic expression for people with special needs through drama, dance, creative writing, music and the visual arts.8