When senior Cristian Nava was growing up, his mother, who is an art teacher at Rolling Meadows High School, often brought up something called the Richard W. Calisch Arts Unlimited Award because one of her favorite students had previously won it, and Nava’s peer, Kelly Jordan, had won it in 2024. 

The Calisch Award, named after the former English teacher and humanities division head at Elk Grove High School who founded the award, honors high school students across District 214 seniors who exemplify fantastic performance in the fine arts program, including theater, music, visual arts and music. 

This year, Nava was one of six students who was presented the prestige of the Calisch Award.

“I’ve enjoyed every memory I’ve made in [the fine arts] from theater to speech to marching band, and it means a lot to be recognized,” Nava said. 

Nava got nominated for the award by the Prospect fine arts coordinator Jeremy Morton (JMo). JMo had asked him to send him a list of every fine arts related activity  that Nava had ever been involved in to add to the application. Nava spent an entire afternoon recalling and writing down every performance he ever had.

“That was really daunting,” Nava said. “I even had to put like a single song I sang one time for a random group.” 

Besides the random gigs here and there, throughout his four years in the fine arts at Prospect, the programs that Nava was mainly a part of were marching and symphonic band, 10 out of 14 theater productions, speech team, the Madrigals choir, honors choir, acapella and vocal jazz. 

“I think the thing that helped me get all of these connections was that I would sing for practically anything they asked me to do as a soloist,” Nava said. 

Nava plans on continuing his passion for the fine arts at Roosevelt University, where he is going to major in musical theater. 

“I’m really happy with the footprint that I’ve left on the Prospect fine arts and even the district fine arts for that,” Nava said. 

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Never miss important news: every Monday, get a preview of what’s going on this week at Prospect, and what went down last week. To sign up for the Knight Notes newsletter, click here.