Mr. Robert Schultz

Local Arts Agency Fills in the Arts Education Gap for School District

Posted by Mr. Robert Schultz, Aug 21, 2012 3 comments


Mr. Robert Schultz

Rob Schultz

One of the more disturbing trends in our local public schools is the reduction of classroom time devoted to non-tested subjects. Despite the arts being labeled as “core,” tested areas of the curriculum are among the few things receiving adequate time and resources from strapped school districts.

Going the way of the horse-drawn carriage are things like music, chorus, theater, and visual arts, as well as formerly routine components of a well-rounded education such as recess, and field trips.

For those of us who work outside of public school systems but are determined to provide children with quality arts opportunities, one answer lies in building effective partnerships with our schools.

For many years (decades, actually) the Mesa Arts Center has worked with our local public school system as a partner in delivering accessible programs. For several years, grant funding allowed us to bring fifth graders from a 100 percent at-risk school to our arts center for targeted, afterschool activities in both visual and performing arts, taught by our full-time arts instructors. While the school didn’t have resources for transportation, our grant provided it—from school to the arts center, and we took them home.

More recently, for the last six years the arts center has used funding from our own Foundation to present our “Basic Arts” program at another elementary school. This program focuses on literature, with the school hosting our teaching artists and kids learning about a literary story. As a finale, the students are brought to the arts center to see the story performed live on the stage of one of our theaters, followed by talk-back and Q&A with the actors and director.

As we saw the results of these two programs and the benefits they bring to underserved children, we committed to hiring a full-time Arts Education Outreach Coordinator to really move things into high gear and create other partnerships.

Under her direction, we began a Creative Aging Program that brings a visual artist and a dance artist to assisted living facilities to work with ambulatory seniors, as well as a group of seniors afflicted with dementia; the Culture Connect Program, which provides free theater tickets to area schools so their students can attend performances, participatory activities, workshops, literature, and live artist demonstrations; and a comprehensive Jazz A to Z Program that uses the National Endowment for the Arts’s Jazz Curriculum as a guide to provide students opportunities to improvise, analyze, synthesize, engage in group collaborations, develop an individual voice, and broaden cultural perspectives—all through the uniquely American medium of jazz.

In FY 2011-12, these programs served 293 schools and 39,500 school-age students. Response has been tremendous—but that’s to be expected from a public school system that has administrators and teachers clearly recognizing the benefits of arts education in their curriculum, but feeling hamstrung by narrow-minded dictates and test-focused mandates.

Our goal must be to continue overcoming that barrier by offering meaningful partnerships that fill the gaps that the schools can’t. That battle is likely to continue.

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3 responses for Local Arts Agency Fills in the Arts Education Gap for School District

Comments

Deb V. says
August 21, 2012 at 4:24 pm

We have this debate in our state all the time: how can arts organizations who are critical to helping fill the gaps in our schools, be part of a long-term sustainable solution that helps schools build their programs up? It's so important that these kinds of partnerships exist, but how does the NFP sector help schools stand back on their own two feet in terms of arts education? While funders are always excited about arts education projects, there are limited dollars in the philanthropic community just as there are in the education community. I'm interested to hear if this has been part of your conversation with the district . . .

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August 24, 2012 at 11:47 am

In almost 2 decades of running an arts nonprofit, this idea never occurred to us and I'll tell you why. Professional, practicing artists who are out there doing it deliver quite different programming than do most teachers (not all) trained to deliver arts in the schools. AND, nonprofit organizations typically conduct quite different assessments than do schools. In fact, the basic premises on which the two types of education are based are typically so different that many practicing artists wouldn't want to work within the confines of a school system unless as a visiting artist in residence.

Why? Schools have had to succumb to the 'teaching to the test' mentality ... artists typically balk at that and prefer, instead, to teach to the life in the student. We actually had to develop our own evaluation tool (which we now offer as software) - all of the other tools we found were way too focused on how the students fit into someone else's boxes.

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August 21, 2012 at 5:58 pm

Thanks for your comment, Deb. Truthfully, we have not had this type of conversation with our school district. Our relationship has been focused on identifying and managing projects, not the crafting of an overall vision. Perhaps we should put that on the table!

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