The Savannah College of Art and Design’s New Creative Program for Public School Teachers Across Georgia

There’s a version of teacher professional development that most educators know well. It usually involves a conference room, a PowerPoint, lukewarm coffee, and a binder full of frameworks they’ll never open again. What SCAD is doing in Savannah looks nothing like that.

In 2025, the Red Dot Design Award Rankings ranked Savannah College of Art and Design as the top design university in the Americas and Europe. The college has quietly developed one of Georgia’s more thoughtful educational programs. The university provides public school teachers throughout the state with something truly unique through its SCAD Educator Forum and Advanced Placement Institute: professional development that views educators as artists rather than administrators.

Through a variety of educational and recreational activities set within a thriving art scene, educators at the SCAD Educator Forum revitalize their creative energy while learning new skills. Faculty, graduate students, and alumni from SCAD lead workshops that cover everything from design thinking to studio practice. Participants have access to all of the university’s spaces, resources, and libraries while receiving individualized instruction, interacting with peers, and exploring a variety of practical methods and processes. All of this takes place within SCAD’s Savannah facilities.

The difference from the typical school district in-service day is difficult to ignore. SCADSCAD The location is also important. Savannah’s historic district, with its Spanish moss, pastel facades, and cobblestone squares, is an integral part of the experience. Walking through a city where nearly every block contains a renovated SCAD building tends to do something to a person’s sense of what’s possible. Art teachers from rural Georgia counties, high school English teachers from Atlanta suburbs, elementary educators from small towns near the coast — they arrive in a place that takes creative work seriously. That alone changes the atmosphere.

SCAD’s other premier educator program, the Advanced Placement Institute, certifies instructors to teach AP courses in computer science principles, art and design, and art history. Teachers who complete the program receive a course record that can be submitted toward professional learning units — the continuing education credits Georgia requires for certificate renewal. Cost is less of a barrier than it might initially seem because the College Board provides qualifying teachers at schools without funding for professional development with the chance to attend an AP Institute for free. Then there’s the half-tuition scholarship, which is arguably the program’s least well-known offer.

A half-tuition scholarship to attend SCAD at any location or through SCADnow online may be available to educators working full-time or part-time at any public or private institution recognized by their state’s department of education, from the first grade through university. For a school where tuition costs more than $42,000 per year, that is a substantial amount. Although the number of Georgia public school teachers who are aware of this pathway is still unknown, it is a documented and actual opportunity. SCAD

What makes SCAD’s approach feel different isn’t just the setting or the scholarship figures. It’s the fundamental presumption. Most professional development for teachers is designed around improving student outcomes — measurable, testable, aligned to standards. SCAD’s educator programs seem to operate on a different premise: that a teacher who feels creatively alive brings something into the classroom that no rubric can fully capture. SCAD’s SERVE initiative has already demonstrated this intuition in action — its Buzz Bus program makes surprise visits to K–12 schools in Savannah, bringing one-on-one workshops, book readings, and art-supply donations directly to students who might otherwise have no access to working artists.

A Title I school art teacher summed up the experience by saying that her students’ interest in college increased following that visit. The Educator Forum, the AP Institute, the half-tuition scholarship, and the Buzz Bus are all connected by SCAD. In addition to its own enrollment figures, SCAD appears to genuinely care about what takes place in Georgia’s public school classrooms. Whether that investment deepens over time is worth watching. For the time being, the programs are available, the doors are open, and Georgia teachers who are willing to spend a week in Savannah may return transformed in ways that are hard to measure but simple to sense.