Continuation schools were developed to enable students to continue earning a high school diploma while they worked, often full time, to support themselves and their families. Traditionally, continuation schools were home to poor teachers, narrowed curriculum and an unwelcoming culture. Intuitively, students attending today's continuation schools are those most in need of innovative teachers, a broad curriculum that offers a wide platform for different learning modalities, and a welcoming culture. In short, in order for such students to be successful, the continuation school curriculum should be arts-based. The strengths of an arts education are many. Fine arts are symbol systems, on a par with numbers and letters. They connect motivation, instruction, assessment and practical application in a way that leads to deep understanding; they merge learning process and content and they encourage higher-order thinking skills. Finally, the arts provide avenues by which all students can learn and they improve academic achievement and standardized test scores. In this article, the authors present a survey of continuation school principals regarding their attitudes towards arts and a case study of Olympic High School in Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District about its use of arts to encourage its students' personal growth and academic success. They also list suggested policies for supporting the arts.