Speaking out for art education's sake: Community goes to the mat and wins

"Art is the Queen of all sciences communicating knowledge to all the generations of the world."

— Leonardo da Vinci

It started out looking like any other school board meeting. Administrators, board members, a local reporter and a few parents were settling into chairs in a small classroom at the Bellows Falls Middle School on a quiet January weeknight. But on this particular evening, things started seeming out of the ordinary fairly quickly. The room began filling with more parents and community members than usual, excited chatter grew, administrators looked solemn and a couple of board members seemed tense.

The school janitor started bringing in more chairs and tables were nudged to make space for the growing crowd, with earnest tête-à-têtes, broad smiles and a lot of surprised expressions emerging around the room. Suddenly, someone announced that we were moving to the auditorium, which fueled the commotion further.

Me? I was positively giddy.

Word had traveled through the community earlier in the week that the School Board was poised to make cuts to art, music and physical education at the school that night, so a few of us had done our best to alert fellow parents, neighbors and art advocates with the hopes that a strong presence at the meeting might dissuade the School Board from making proposed reductions.

Though we knew these are hard times and budgets are thin, this is a community that prides itself on a thriving art scene, having built a widespread reputation as an eminent, vibrant epicenter of fine arts, music, literature and theater with wonderful venues, events and festivals that draw patrons from near and far.

Cutting art programs here would be like reducing computer classes in Silicon Valley or Little League in Boston. Art is part of the bedrock of this community, yet here we were facing the possibility of our own children having this crucial element of their education reduced.

I'd hoped for 20 attendees or so, 30 tops, but as people kept streaming down the aisles and into seats it became clear that this was no little flurry of artsy parental protest. The chair called the meeting to order and, as the board discussed other business on the agenda, I went to the back of the room and did a head count: A full 162 people were in attendance. Even better, a remarkable 60 of them had signed up to speak.

When our item came up on the agenda, speakers were asked to stand, state their name and say their piece. Parents, grandparents, teachers, former teachers, staff members, community members and business owners spoke with passion, eloquence and occasionally palpable disdain for the very notion of eroding the schools' art programs in a culturally rich community such as ours. Some told stories of students whose difficult home lives were assuaged by their immersion into art projects at school, while others insisted that if it weren't for music their child would never have discovered a remarkable talent.

At one point I recited a list of factoids that I thought might resonate with board members concerned about student performance in standardized testing. One report, from the College Entrance Examination Board, found that "students who studied art scored significantly higher than the national average on SATs" and that "visual arts education greatly contributes to reading persistence and organization as well as reasoning skills required for success in math and science."

The U.S. Dept. of Education also published "Schools, Communities and the Arts: A Research Compendium," which shows, according to more than 3,000 studies, "music education specifically fosters stronger spatial reasoning necessary for solving mathematical problems, creative scientific processes and developing general planning skills."

And, according to "Effects of Physical Education and Activity Levels on Academic Achievement in Children," published by the American College of Sports Medicine, "Numerous studies have shown positive relationships between academic achievement and both physical activity and sports participation." Though it might be assumed physical education simply means sports, it also includes creative movement and allows kids to explore dance in a way they might never be able to otherwise.

Far more powerful than any adults' stories or stats, however, were the students themselves. It was obvious that most had never spoken in front of such a large group, much less held a big microphone, but one by one, and sometimes in groups, they stood and spoke. One trio of girls read a poem they'd written based on John Lennon's "Imagine," about what their lives would be like with no art programs. Then a quiet boy explained that his coach had become an important mentor to him and that he couldn't make it through school without having gym class to look forward to.

Perhaps the most moving moment was when a shy, pale girl gingerly took the mic, her spiky pink hair falling into teary, heavily mascaraed eyes and choked that if it wasn't for band she wouldn't want to come to school at all and that music was her motivation for doing everything else.

In the end, enough members of the board heeded the heartfelt accounts of student engagement and success being intrinsically connected to art programs, and figured out how to avoid making cuts to art and music, though the physical education program was unfortunately reduced. It meant that the school's principal, Cheryl McDaniel-Thomas, was going to have to do some mighty creative budget management, but she was ready for the challenge and has been amazing us with her innovative vision and resourcefulness ever since.

This pragmatic ingenuity and commitment to creativity permeates the entire district staff and was on beautiful display recently when the Saxtons River Elementary School put on its spring concert. With the direction of music teacher Alissa Daigneault, beautiful sets painted by students with the guidance of art teacher Colleen Grout and inventive choreography by gym teacher Mary Lou Smith — who was named the 2007 Vermont Elementary Physical Education Teacher of the Year — the kids seemed to take everything that was said to the School Board that night in January and put it into colorful, expressive motion.

They played rousing tunes on recorder, performed complex dances, put on a death-defying jump rope display and sang delightful songs, including one that put the name of every state to the tune of "Turkey In the Straw." How's that for augmenting academics through art?

When I asked Smith her opinion on the value of the arts, she was enthusiastic and direct. "The arts give students the opportunity to be creative - a fast disappearing skill in this age of reliance on test scores. Often I will give students a piece of equipment and say 'Show me what you can do with this' and they come up with things I never would have thought of. When students are given the opportunity to think and explore on their own they come up with the most amazing ideas."

Art instructor extraordinaire Colleen Grout believes her curriculum manual, based on the National Standards for Arts Education, says it all. "Arts education benefits the student because it cultivates the whole child, gradually building many kinds of literacy while developing intuition, reasoning, imagination and dexterity into unique forms of expression and communication. An education in the arts benefits society because students of the arts gain powerful tools for understanding human experiences, past and present. They learn to respect the often very different ways others have of thinking, working and expressing themselves. They learn to make decisions in situations where there are no standard answers. By studying the arts, students stimulate their natural creativity and learn to develop it to meet the needs of a complex and competitive society. And, as study and competence in the arts reinforce one other, the joy of learning becomes real, tangible and powerful."

Amen.

To support arts education in Vermont, contact the Vermont Alliance For Arts Education at www.vaae.org.

Annie: annieguyoncommunications.com