Schooled in the Arts

Could there be a Van Gogh at Valle Lindo Elementary School in Camarillo? A Mozart at Moorpark’s Marina West? Does the next Meryl Streep attend Simi Valley High?

We may never know, say advocates of the visual and performing arts, unless Ventura County schools make art, music, drama and dance a bigger part of the school day.

In most California school districts, according to the Department of Education, only 10% to 25% of students participate in some form of arts education, and none has more than 50% participating. A survey of arts teachers in four counties, including Ventura, found that in most school districts, 2% of all teachers were qualified arts instructors. No district topped 7%. And California ranks 50th among the states in the ratio of music teachers to students.

In Ventura County, the schools are a spotty canvas of artistic activity, particularly in elementary and middle schools, where a student’s exposure to the arts can be limited to a single teacher with a projector and slides of her trip to Rome.

What is keeping the arts out of schools is not a lack of interest or doubts about their value. Educators are aware of research showing that students who are exposed to the arts, especially music, do better in school and on standardized tests.

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One review showed that students who studied the arts more than four years scored 59 points higher on the verbal SAT and 44 points higher on the math test than students with no course work or experience in the arts. Other studies found that the arts improve students’ ability to understand abstract ideas and recognize patterns. Research shows that learning and performing music helps exercise the brain and strengthen the synapses between brain cells.

The obstacles to better arts education are money and time. School districts first put their dollars--and hours--into reading, writing and arithmetic. What little, if anything, is left may be spent on arts materials and teachers.

“It’s something that everybody knows is missing, but nobody’s taking the initiative,” said Lynn Decker, arts consultant to the Ventura County superintendent of schools.

Resigned to not having full casts of drama, music, art and dance teachers in every Ventura County school, Decker and other local arts advocates are employing innovative strategies to expose students to culture. If you can’t afford to hire artists and musicians as teachers, so the theory goes, maybe you can turn your teachers into artists and musicians.

Arts advocates have begun to train interested, and at least minimally talented, classroom teachers in painting, playing instruments and other creative skills, and giving this group ideas for integrating the arts into their lessons.

Among their suggestions: improving reading skills through biographies of famous artists, then trying to duplicate their work. In the case of Georgia O’Keefe, students might read her life story, then try their hand at her Southwestern brush styles.

They could drill multiplication tables using varying dance rhythms and tempos. They might create plays from books read in class. At one elementary school, teachers applying the new techniques have already produced a musical version of the children’s classic, “Where the Wild Things Are.”

There was a time when the visual and performing arts were more a part of public schools. Until sometime between 1960 and 1970, California teachers had to play a musical instrument to receive a credential.

“When that went, then it sent a clear message that the arts are a frill, they are not a mainstay,” Ventura County Supt. Chuck Weis said.

The arts took another, more devastating hit in 1978, with the passage of Proposition 13, the landmark ballot measure that froze property taxes funding California’s schools. With shrunken budgets, schools were forced to sell off their band instruments and fire their art and music teachers. Counselors, nurses and librarians also lost their jobs.

Decker was among the art and music teachers who could not find work after Proposition 13. Moving from a Minnesota elementary school with seven vocal music teachers, a strings teacher and a band teacher, Decker was shocked by what she found in California.

“When I came out here, it was like everything had been wiped off the map,” she said.

Twenty-one years later, Proposition 13 is still being felt, and not just in the bottom line. Many young teachers were educated in a system nearly devoid of the arts.

Not having that exposure can leave teachers feeling uncomfortable teaching the arts, a kind of phobia they pass on to another generation of students.

Angela Hernandez, a first-grade teacher at Westlake Hills, admits she has “no artistic ability at all.” But Hernandez has taken a series of in-school lessons on teaching visual art “so that some day, when those kids are 31 years old, they don’t feel like I feel.”

To supplement her classroom social studies lessons, Hernandez asks her students to draw portraits of Abraham Lincoln and other figures they’re reading about. In addition to complementing her students’ reading, the “proportional drawing” method she learned in the program doubles as a lesson in fractions.

Patricia Robinson, a professional artist who has taught the method to more than 100 teachers across Ventura County, said some of her students, such as Hernandez, were reluctant to embrace the arts in their classrooms.

Now, Robinson said, “They’re all so enjoying it and seeing how well the kids do, that they’ve turned around and all are behind it.”

Among them is Terri Barrett, a Westlake Hills second-grade teacher who recently completed the 26-hour training program. “I always thought art was for people who were born with it, and it’s not.”

But even if teachers have an interest in the arts, they say, they have little time to pursue them in class. With parents’ eyes increasingly on prized colleges, teachers and school administrators feel great pressure to produce students with high scores in the core subjects.

“There’s so much accountability and whatnot coming down from the state. How do you balance these two things?” asked Patricia Fulbright, principal at McKevett, Santa Paula’s magnet elementary school in the arts.

Fulbright and other arts advocates are challenging those who believe schools should teach just the three Rs. In particular, they are fighting the perception that the arts are merely “fun” time, like recess but with crayons, songbooks or costumes.

“People sometimes see the arts as whipped cream on top of the sundae, when, instead, it can be the ice cream,” Fulbright said. “They have a hard time seeing it can be part of the concoction.”

Artistically literate students can express themselves through the arts, as well as understand their place in a historical and cultural context, supporters believe.

At McKevett, teachers try to incorporate the visual and performing arts into as many of their lessons as possible. The arts are “the fuel that runs the engine,” said Terry Brenner-Farrell, McKevett’s arts resource coordinator.

In Brenner-Farrell’s third-grade class, for example, students recently read a book whose main character was 8 years old in 1919. They then calculated how old the boy would be today--88--and created paper sculpture portraits of themselves at that age.

In another McKevett classroom, inspired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Van Gogh exhibit, students have spent much of the year tying their lessons to Van Gogh’s life and painting.

Students can also use the school’s two karaoke machines to improve their oral reading.

McKevett, where English is the second language for 35% of students, has found that making the arts a large part of the school day offers those students another vehicle for expression.

“It gives kids a lot of opportunities for success in a lot of different areas,” Brenner-Farrell said.

Advocates are making their case for arts integration most strongly in Ventura County’s elementary schools and middle schools. There is a different problem at the high school level.

While local high schools usually have at least one teacher assigned to arts instruction, these teachers are encountering freshmen who are artistically illiterate. To graduate, high school students must generally take a year of either art or a foreign language, or a combination of both. The state Legislature is considering requiring a year of both subjects, matching the entrance requirements of both the University of California and the Cal State systems.

Even with those beefed-up standards, “just taking one kind of survey course, that’s not going to cut it in high school. They really need that foundation,” said Patty Taylor, the state Department of Education’s visual and performing arts consultant.

The key to getting students to take optional arts classes at the high school level is designing courses that will benefit students beyond graduation, said Santa Paula Union High Supt. Bill Brand.

“If students do not feel that this will benefit them in the future, they will stay away from it,” Brand said. Santa Paula High School makes its arts offerings attractive by combining them with technology, he said.

For example, students recently painted a mural depicting 100 years of the school’s history--but not before they had researched, written reports and designed the mural’s four panels on computer.

“They’re working the other side of that brain, the creative side that they sometimes don’t get a chance to use,” Brand said.

The arts-tech pairing is also working at Santa Susana High in Simi Valley, Ventura County’s magnet school for the performing arts and technology. The 3-year-old school, which offers classes in animation and graphic design along with ballet and children’s theater, was recently recognized as a California Distinguished School.

But even at the county’s performing arts magnet school, there is no theater. Instead, students put on plays and dance in the former junior high’s multiuse room.

While schools such as Santa Susana and McKevett work hard--often with limited resources--to weave the arts into traditional lessons, advocates are still pushing art for art’s sake.

“They need to be integrated into the curriculum, in addition to having their own distinct place,” said Susan Feller of the Ventura County Arts Council.

To that end, the arts council and the county schools office organize and promote assemblies and classes with visiting artists and performers. The New West Symphony, the Channel Islands Ballet Company and several Ventura County museums are just some of the local arts groups that offer outreach programs that bring students, mostly elementary and middle school pupils, to their performances and exhibitions.

New West’s “Symphonic Adventures” program provides teachers with lesson plans and materials to prepare their students for attending a concert--when to clap, not to squirm--and to familiarize them with the orchestra and specific classical composers.

Grants from the state and foundations often fund these outreach programs, as well as the activities of the Ventura County Arts Council. In many schools and in many districts, fund-raising by parents also kicks in a sizable portion of arts funding. PTA groups around the county are paying for band instruments and even teachers’ salaries.

In 1991, when Pleasant Valley School District cut out weekly instrumental music instruction, a group of parents began raising money to bring it back. Today, all Pleasant Valley students in fourth through eighth grades take a beginning band class twice a week and have the option to continue through three more levels. The parents’ group, Save Our Kids Music, foots the $32,000 bill.

Their effort, founder Betty Weyek said, stems from more than just the belief that all children should be exposed to music.

“I think it gives kids pride in doing something,” said Weyek, whose children played in their high school band. “Everybody’s kind of equal. You don’t have to be the No. 1 best person to participate. . . . You don’t have to be the superstar to feel good.”

Offering music to children when they are young makes them more interested in music when they are older, Weyek said. In 1991, the Camarillo High School band had 20 members. Now it has 60, she said, attributing the growth to the organization’s efforts.

The group fears that because it exists and has been successful in keeping music in Camarillo’s elementary schools, the school district will never spend its own money on music.

But support for the arts at the state level is bubbling. The Department of Education has created a detailed curriculum framework that schools can select, and it has published Arts Work, a summary of research supporting arts education and a plan of action for increasing arts-related activity in California schools.

“The curriculum is out there,” Feller said. “It’s just a matter of getting people informed about it.”

In Ventura County, the arts council is publicizing the state-designed framework through its Arts Advantage schools. Fifteen county schools are designated as Arts Advantage schools, which doesn’t bring them much money but does offer support from the county schools office and the arts council, along with workshops for training and networking.

The school districts most committed to the arts have a clear plan, said Taylor, the state’s visual arts consultant.

“They look at a sequential program rather than, oh, something-here-something-there,” she said. “They’re certainly working toward having the arts at every grade level for all students. They teach the knowledge and skills required for the arts, but they have also worked with their teachers through professional development to show how students can learn through the arts.

“In the schools where they’ve really focused, they’ve had improved test scores,” Taylor added.

But even at the most arts-involved schools, Feller said, “no matter what they’re doing, it’s not enough.”

Aside from making the argument that the arts have carry-over benefits in other subjects, arts boosters like Feller absolutely believe that without being exposed to the arts, children will grow into boring adults. The arts enrich a part of the brain, even the soul, they say, in a way that textbooks and math problems cannot.

“Even if you don’t become an artist yourself, you can appreciate the wonderful talent that goes into everything that entertains us,” said Ventura County Supt. Weis. He believes artistic literacy is a skill as basic and essential as reading and mathematics.

And being familiar with and comfortable in the arts opens up another realm of career possibilities for students, particularly in entertainment-heavy Southern California.

“The skills and the knowledge gained through the arts,” Taylor said, “really help you in any career.”