Seeking Creative Outlets in O.C. Schools

Concerned that students are being shortchanged in the arts, Orange County’s arts community is spearheading an effort to help local schools beef up music, theater, dance and visual art classes.

The move comes as big cities including Los Angeles, New York and Boston are starting to kick in the dollars needed to reinstitute programs that had been trimmed in two decades of budget cutting. Orange County, with its patchwork of 27 school districts, has never had a coordinated program to educate its more than 500,000 students in the arts.

“We want to get more arts education into more schools in a more cost-efficient way and [seek] funding to sustain it all,” said Louise K. Stevens, a nationally recognized private arts consultant who has been hired for the $80,000 Orange County Arts Education Initiative.

One goal is to determine what gaps exist in classrooms that can be filled by linking them with area museums, music, dance and theater troupes. Another is to help schools lobby for more arts education dollars to boost their own curricula.

The countywide effort is being underwritten, in part, by Disneyland and others concerned about grooming future animators, designers and others with arts backgrounds.

“Creative thinking is important in corporate life today, [and arts classes] get students to ask questions and to look at all possibilities in coming up with a variety of solutions to problems,” said Jill Bolton, community relations manager for Disneyland and its Anaheim hotels.

California’s $25-billion entertainment industry is in constant need of artists to design movie special effects, animated films and computer games.

“We can’t find enough digital animators, and it’s not just for ‘Jurassic Park,’ ” said Assemblyman Kevin Murray (D-Los Angeles), who has proposed a bill to require arts instruction in California’s public school core curricula. “It’s for modeling at Toyota’s design center in Torrance and in all forms of research and development. We’re not finding people with the aesthetic sense or creativity to really move industry forward.”

Benefits of Arts

Since passage of Proposition 13 in 1978, arts education has been viewed as a luxury as school districts struggled to balance budgets across California. The Orange County initiative is the first of its kind in Southern California but is akin to efforts in Rhode Island, Massachusetts and elsewhere that have bolstered collaborations among schools and professional arts organizations.

The push comes at a time when new research shows that arts education bolsters general school performance.

“What students learn through the arts is exactly what the workplace is looking for,” said Phyllis Berenbeim, arts coordinator for the Orange County Department of Education, which is collaborating with Arts Orange County, an Irvine-based nonprofit agency, on the initiative. “Research shows that those with rich arts experiences do better on their math and reading scores, have increased self-esteem and learn teamwork.”

Arts Orange County--working with advisory committees of educators, school board members, arts administrators, potential underwriters and parents--has raised about 25% of the total needed to complete the project’s analysis phase by next spring.

The Orange County Department of Education has contributed $4,800, and the California Arts Council, a state agency, has given $12,800. Disneyland, which donated $5,000, is among the three private funders to back the effort to date. Newport Beach arts patrons Mary and Phil Lyons and the Pacific Life Foundation gave $2,500 each.

Some arts programs have survived and others are beginning to trickle back.

At Westminster’s L.P. Webber Elementary School, students sporting glittering headdresses recently sang Gershwin show tunes to culminate a year’s worth of musical studies. A frill? Not hardly. Not at Webber.

The only music instruction every Webber student gets crowds them into doubled-up classrooms for half an hour once a week, teachers say. Art, drama and dance classes don’t exist.

Some schools, notably in Santa Ana and Irvine, have worked hard to keep strong arts programs, often because parents help teach or pay for classes. In Huntington Beach, the Ocean View School District recently added instrumental music, which had been totally cut for at least 15 years, said Charlene Gould, a district drama teacher who serves on the education initiative’s steering committee.

Funding Boom

It is a movement gaining steam across the nation.

The U.S. Department of Education has funded the creation of voluntary national standards for arts education. California Supt. of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin has proposed a $200-million plan aimed at making arts education a priority in public schools. Eastin also supports Murray’s bill.

In June, the Los Angeles Board of Education unanimously approved $2.45 million for materials, teacher training and advisors for elementary and secondary schools throughout the massive school district. And New York city and county recently gave public schools a $75-million grant for the arts.

The healthy economy has helped fuel the restorations, which also are being driven by the growing body of research into arts and learning.

Last year, scientists at UC Irvine and the University of Wisconsin found that preschoolers who get piano lessons have significantly increased reasoning abilities in science and math. Now, they are giving piano lessons to second-graders to test whether it helps them grasp complex concepts such as fractions.

The Orange County initiative began this month with a survey of 120 arts organizations, to be followed by questionnaires for public and private schools, all in an effort to document what remains of music, theater, dance and art classes.

The next step will be for Stevens and others to interview participants and analyze the questionnaires’ findings. Stevens, one of many consultants who have overseen such studies from Alaska to Maine, won’t predict the outcome. But the former Milwaukee Journal music critic now living in Montana said her goal is to help create more partnerships between schools and arts groups.

Many Orange County arts groups, working in part to ensure future audiences, have long sent trombonists, dramatic skits or exhibits-on-wheels to local schools or staged tours or special concerts, reaching thousands of students annually. But the outreach efforts don’t include enough schools and could be more effective, officials say.

Big Task Ahead

Initiative organizers say coordinating programs for more than 100 arts groups and nearly 460,000 public and 58,000 private school children won’t be easy. Some also worried about saddling arts organizations with too much of the burden, or creating a perception of the arts only as educational tools.

Nonetheless, they hope the project generates more private and public funds for arts instruction, as Stevens’ studies have elsewhere. A citywide arts education plan she facilitated in Boston in 1995 received an initial $2-million allotment from city coffers, officials there said; a similar program she coordinated for the state of Massachusetts helped schools meet the requirements of the Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993, which makes the arts a core subject like math and science.

Indeed, with similar legislation pending in California, Stevens says now is the perfect time for the county’s arts education initiative.

“There’s a long distance between legislation and reality,” she said. “And reality doesn’t really happen unless you have local strategies, particularly with education, which is a fiercely local sector of society.”