Armed with a $24-million special endowment, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has begun what its leaders say will be a long-term campaign to help plant visual art instruction securely in county public schools.
"Nationwide, I don't think there's another museum program on this scale" for bringing such teaching into public classrooms, said LACMA's director, Michael Govan. "We're trying to establish more and more things that lead the field."
"We've never done anything on this scale. . . . We've never done anything in this depth," said Jane Burrell, who heads the museum's $3.3-million-a-year education department.
Under the program, LACMA-paid instructors should become familiar presences in 18 elementary and middle schools that will be among the primary feeders for a Los Angeles Unified School District downtown arts high school, due to open in 2009.
The $1-million-a-year initiative, dubbed LACMA On-Site, will stay in the area, known as Local District 4, for at least four years. Each classroom in seven chosen elementary schools will get an intensive, six-lesson art sequence each year for two years; then the process will repeat in seven other grade schools. Comparable programs will take place in the four middle schools for all four years.
Hunger for art programs
Besides working with students, LACMA-sponsored artists aim to be mentors for regular classroom teachers, helping them gain the know-how to keep art learning going after the two or four years are up and the museum's caravan has moved on to a new set of schools.
Underwriting the plan is a large education bequest from Anna Bing Arnold, a philanthropist and art collector who was one of the museum's founding trustees. District 4 stretches from the Pasadena Freeway through downtown and west to Beverly Hills and will supply about 1,200 of the arts high school's 1,700 students.
Richard Alonzo, the former art teacher who is superintendent of District 4, said he pushed for the partnership with LACMA because "How can you have an arts high school that doesn't have children prepared to access world-class arts instruction?" District 4's enrollment is predominantly Latino, and last year nearly half its students were classified as English learners.
