Art in the Schools

The IMA the San Juan Island School District (SJISD) have partnered to create a community based program to provide art education for our youth. We are working together toward a common goal: To re-establish art education in our public schools, ensuring that every school-aged child, regardless of economic means and developmental ability, benefits from art instruction as an integral part of their basic public school education.

Our project has three basic components:

• At the Middle School Level: Re-establish two periods of daily Visual Arts Instruction for grades 6, 7, & 8
• At the Elementary School Level: An Artist in Residence collaborative art program has been implemented with the elementary teachers to augment and enrich the core curriculum and align with the Washington State Essential Academic Learning Requirements (EALRs).
• At the Community Level: A year-end "ArtWalk" at the Middle School will serve as the primary assessment of the students' success.

The Art in the Schools project is supported by the IMA through donations and grants. We wish to thank the following organizations for their generous support:

Washington State Arts Commission
San Juan Community Foundation
The Moss Foundation
The Norcliffe Foundation

On-going research on the arts and cognition demonstrates a correlation between training in the arts and improved academic performance, which emphasizes the importance of the arts as core discipline and provides solid reasons for the College Board to become a strong advocate for the arts becoming an integral part of the core curriculum.
-National Task Force on Arts in Education College Board report, 2009.

SJISD and IMA Bring Art Classes Back To Middle School

The San Juan Island School District (SJISD) will be restoring two periods of Exploratory Art Instruction for grades 6-8 at Friday Harbor Middle School second semester. Weekly art instruction for children ages 5 – 14 ceased to exist because of cuts in the 2009-10 district budget. Re-establishing these classes is the first step in a collaborative partnership between the Islands Museum of Art (IMA) and the district to raise funds and create a community-based art program at Friday Harbor Elementary and Friday Harbor Middle schools.

IMA was recently awarded a $5,000 grant from the Norcliffe Foundation in Seattle to support the art education project. This grant, combined with $1,000 grant from the San Juan Community Foundation and funds from The Moss Foundation and private donors, helped to launch the project. The school district has agreed to fund one of the two classes being added and to provide stop-gap funding for the second while the remaining funds are raised by IMA through grants and private donations. In addition, IMA is working on funding an Arts Docent Program and artist residencies at Friday Harbor Elementary School.

Bryn Barnard has been selected to teach the middle school classes along with high school art teacher, Andy Anderson. Barnard, an illustrator for twenty years, also brings a strong background in art education. In addition to serving as an assistant professor of illustration in the Department of Art at the University of Delaware, and a senior lecturer in the Department of Illustration at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, he also won a Fulbright fellowship to teach illustration and design at the University Sains Malaysia in Penang.

"This is great news," says Charlie Bodenstab, President of the IMA Board of Directors. "Study in the arts promotes creative problem solving and critical thinking skills that benefit all areas of core learning and all career paths." Bodenstab points to research by The College Board, which administers the SAT and Advanced Placement Programs, showing that high school students who receive even one year of study in art increase their SAT scores by an average of 25 points. Scores increase up to 44 points for those who have 4 years of studio art.

"Continuity of knowledge is key, however," warns Bodenstab. "Just as you would not expect a high school student to solve complex equations without having learned basic math, likewise, the essential skills fostered by arts education must be built upon a foundation of knowledge and experience that begins in childhood."

The overall goal of the partnership is to ensure that every school-age child, regardless of economic means and developmental ability, benefits from art instruction as an integral part of their basic education.