In response to a recent LA Times article concerning the lack of arts access in LAUSD, P.S. ARTS CEO Dr. Kristen Paglia positions nonprofit and philanthropic partnerships as a sustainable, scalable model to address district-wide arts education.
I read the recent LA Times article about the scarcity of the arts in LAUSD while I waited in my car for the rain to let up before going to observe a 4th grade visual art class in the Lawndale Elementary School District (LESD). Walking into the classroom, the grey day and the dismal picture of access to the arts in LA public schools described in the piece quickly disappeared behind the students’ paintings of iconic California landscapes. The kids worked with rapt attention, taking care, as their Teaching Artist had instructed them, to “gauge the distance between parallel lines when creating the illusion of depth.”
The creativity and critical thinking in that classroom of 9 and 10 year olds was provided by P.S. ARTS, a nonprofit organization providing 25,000 California public school students across 14 districts with yearlong in-school arts education, and one of the “outside groups” mentioned in the article offering to help LAUSD bridge the gap caused by budget cuts.
LESD’s initiative to provide an integrated arts education curriculum for each and every one of its nearly 6,000 students was launched in 2007 with a $1.5 million grant from the Herb Alpert Foundation. Eight years later, the district now matches philanthropic funds to sustain the P.S. ARTS program and is an excellent example of what such private-public partnerships make possible — last year, results from a two-year study by UCLA Professor Emeritus Dr. James Catterall verified that participation in the P.S. ARTS program significantly increased LESD students’ ability express complex ideas when speaking and writing, and solve problems creatively and collaboratively.
With a $26.5 million budget increase this year for the arts in LAUSD, and district arts director Rory Pullens at the helm, this can be a defining moment for LAUSD. My hope is that LAUSD is gearing up to scale this synergistic approach of pairing high-need schools with high-quality nonprofit providers that has proven so effective in smaller districts.
