Where We’re Headed
Many Paths to Shared Goals
As directed by state law and with educators’ growing understanding of the benefits of the arts, Washington State is moving toward a time when every student in the state’s public schools will have comprehensive, sequential, standards-based arts learning. To be sure, schools will take a variety of paths in developing the necessary professional capacity, infrastructure, and resources for the arts. But there are pioneering schools around the state today that provide a picture of that future. Here are just a few examples.
Mountain Meadow Elementary School: Arts Partnering for Success
Mountain Meadow Elementary School, in Buckley, has made a major commitment to arts education for all its students, in tandem with intensive professional development for teachers. Its successful work in the arts is a result of school and community commitment and leadership combined with district support and strong partnerships with the Pierce County Arts Commission, Arts Impact, and the Tacoma Art Museum. The school has also made use of support from the Washington State Arts Commission’s Community Consortium Grants program.
In 2001–02, Mountain Meadow began a five-year focus on visual arts that has reached all students in the school. Teachers started with a daylong training in the element of color—the curriculum focus for the first year—at the Tacoma Art Museum.
In succeeding years, a resident artist has worked with teachers and students to create visual arts lessons on color, line, shape and form, composition, and texture that teachers then teach independently in every grade level in the building. Four teachers have now completed extensive two-year training on writing, implementing, and assessing lesson plans focused on the arts. Each year, all second, third, and fifth graders travel to the Tacoma Art Museum or the Seattle Art Museum to study exhibits directly related to their classroom learning and participate in hands-on projects in museum studios. This past year ninety-five children also signed up to pursue these lessons further with a local artist in after-school art sessions.
Parents and the community have been strong supporters of the arts at Mountain Meadow. The PTA has provided financial support to the program, covering transportation costs and after school fees. For the 2004–05 school year, the PTA committed $2,000 to the program. During Mountain Meadow’s annual Artwalk, students act as docents; in recent years, the Pierce County Arts Commission has held its monthly meeting at Mountain Meadow that day.
Mountain Meadow’s visual arts curriculum as it is now being developed will be strongly aligned with the arts EALRs. The school’s depth of knowledge in high quality arts education will help staff to prepare for mandatory 2008 state assessments. Lessons are now being implemented at one of the district’s middle schools as well.
Principal Janel Keating reports that the school focuses on all academic areas, and that as their emphasis on the arts has increased, test scores in all areas have risen. With 32 percent of its students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, in 2003–04 Mountain Meadow ranked seventh statewide in combined reading, writing, and math WASL scores.
Ptarmigan Ridge Intermediate School, Orting: Whole School Training
With support from Arts Impact, Ptarmigan Ridge Intermediate School, in the Orting School District, has become a model for whole-school teacher training.
All regular classroom teachers have participated in professional development in the arts through two summer training sessions. Through a district match with Arts Impact, every teacher in the school was compensated for a 16-hour school-year-long commitment to working with colleagues in after-school study circles, developing curriculum in dance, theatre, and visual arts, by drawing on validated state and national sources. The visual arts and dance curricula were completed and adopted by the school board in 2004–05, and the theatre curriculum draft is well underway.
Principal Rex Kerbs notes that this schoolwide process has engaged both teachers and students in the arts at a much deeper level than before. The school’s approach to visual arts has been transformed from the occasional Friday-afternoon crafts project to an ongoing in-depth investigation of perspective, color, texture, geometry, and more. In theatre, students have moved from simple skits to an exploration of vocal work, stage presence, blocking, and so on. Dance has gone beyond calisthenics and moving around to an understanding of symmetry, positive and negative space, and energy. As the whole classroom gets involved, Kerbs says, students understand the rationale for the work; they see how it relates to experiences they have every day and how it enables them to read things differently in the world. Along with that, he says, “It’s great fun.”
Island View Elementary School, Anacortes: Balancing In-school and After-school Arts Education
Island View Elementary School in Anacortes draws on the strong arts organizations in the community to ensure that all children have access to arts courses, both during and after school. The school takes advantage of grants from the Anacortes Arts Association, Kiwanis, and other service organizations to support a variety of arts projects and provide scholarships for students attending the school’s after-school arts programs. Beginning in 2005–06, a part-time cultural education director at the district will coordinate most arts contracts, and will identify community artists to work with classroom teachers at their request. While Island View’s in-school arts programs don’t reach every child every year, they are conducted for a whole grade level at a time, and individual teachers also explore their own arts interests with their students. The school also has an active program of joint projects with community organizations. Each year, a multi-age class of students participates in an intergenerational project with seniors at the senior center. The project is led by a classroom teacher working with the center director. Students and seniors work together on clay, photography, and collage projects. The resulting artwork goes back and forth in exhibits at the center and at the school.
High Schools: Budgeting Time and Money for the Arts
At Joel E. Ferris High School in Spokane, a school-wide commitment to arts, especially vocal and instrumental music, makes it possible for many students to study music for all four years. The school schedules classes in an extended all-staff planning session. Course offerings are staggered in the schedule so students have the maximum opportunity to take their choice of arts subjects. The school budget funds specifically for the arts, with line items and account numbers for every discipline. While the school is known for its strengths in music in particular, students can also study dance, theatre, and visual arts.
In Leavenworth, where
the community is very supportive of the arts, Cascade High School already
requires its students to complete an arts course
in order to graduate. The schedule is adapted so that students can take
both arts and advanced courses during the regular school day, and faculty
allocate funding for courses through an equitable formula that ensures
that the arts get their share. More than 80 percent of Cascade High’s
students complete more than one arts course.
The arts are central at Central Valley High School in Spokane Valley,
and the school’s new state-of-the-art arts building and arts curriculum
were designed with this in mind. Performance-based assessments are universal
in the school’s arts programs; all arts teachers at the school
are certified, and all students must complete two fine or performing
arts credits to graduate.
The experience of these schools and many others around the state shows what’s possible when partners come together to make the arts a priority. They have been able to build the necessary elements for successful arts programs: strong curriculum and assessment, professional development, commitment to scheduling and funding, and strong community partnerships including arts organizations, community leaders, and parents. In the following sections, we take a closer look at these elements