Youth arts program expands to reach more rural schools on Oregon Coast

As summer draws to a close, teachers across Oregon are readying lesson plans for the start of a new school year. But for school districts in rural parts of the state, budgetary constraints may mean that arts literacy and the benefits it offers students aren’t included in the curriculum.

Since 2020, the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology on the central Oregon Coast has been helping fill that need through a monthly youth arts program. It originally served 500 students at two schools in Tillamook County. Oregon ArtsWatch recently reported on the expansion of the program which is launching this fall with a new name, K-8 Create, to serve more than 5,000 students across 17 schools on the coast, from Astoria to Waldport. Ninety-five percent of the students qualify for free or reduced meals and for many, Sitka’s monthly lessons offer the only art instruction they get at school. Alison Dennis is the executive director of the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology. Leeauna Perry is Sitka’s youth program director. They join us to talk about the impact the K-8 Create program is having in rural coastal communities.

Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Jenn Chávez: I’m Jenn Chávez, in this week for Dave Miller. A new school year is about to begin, and for some parents that means clearing some space off the refrigerator door for amazing new artistic creations by their children. But not every school district has the budget they need for robust arts education, especially in rural parts of Oregon. The Sitka Center for Art and Ecology can help with that. Its youth program, K-8 Create, is bringing monthly arts lessons to thousands of students on the Oregon Coast and districts underserved by arts education. Alison Dennis is the Sitka Center’s executive director and Leeauna Perry is the director of its Youth Program. They both join me now to talk about their work in coastal schools and the joys of art in the classroom. Alison and Leeauna, thank you so much for joining us.

Alison Dennis: Thanks so much for having us, Jenn. Pleasure to be here.

Leeauna Perry: Thank you, Jenn.

Chávez: You’re welcome. Welcome to Think Out Loud. Alison, I want to start by asking you, your K-8 Create program is a few years old and has grown rapidly in that time, which is wonderful. How did it get started?

Dennis: Yeah, just as context, the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology is a 54-years-young Oregon Coast education nonprofit. We’re located in the southern tip of Tillamook County in just one of the most beautiful and protected parts of the Oregon Coast, at Cascade Head. For a long time, at that location, we’ve been providing workshops in a broad range of art and craft and creative writing and ecology topics for adult learners. We also have programs for professional artists and scientists who come and stay in residency to pursue independent projects and collaborate. Out in the community, each fall, we host an annual Art Invitational ‒ a large group show that takes place in Portland ‒ and it’s celebrating its 30th anniversary coming up this fall.

And then much more recently, in 2020, we launched a youth program, really in direct response to things we were hearing from local schools in the rural communities where we’re located, serving low income populations and where they’re just, like you were saying, aren’t resources to provide high quality arts education access as part of the school’s curriculum. So we just really listened to those local schools and seeing what we could do to bring our strengths to bear to make a difference.

Chávez: Can you talk a little bit more about that? I mean, what needs or gaps do you see for arts education in rural districts versus more urban districts in the state?

Dennis: According to the Oregon Department of Education’s 2022 Well Rounded Access Program Needs Assessment, students who are living in rural communities and attending rural schools have significantly less arts access, arts courses in their public schools than students in other parts of the state. Somewhere around 45% of students in rural schools attend a school with no arts course of any kind. So that means no visual art, no band or music, no theater, 45% of rural schools. So that’s the need we’re learning about on the front lines on the Coast. We’re just looking to see how we can partner with schools in our region to create a model that, hopefully, we can learn from and grow to serve more rural kids and schools in other parts of the state.

Chávez: Leeauna, I want to turn to you. Can you give us a sense of what a typical lesson you’re offering through the K-8 Create Program might look like or consist of?

Perry: We go into the schools once a month. And every student from preschool through eighth grade gets the same lesson. Each one is uniquely curated to meet the needs of the class as we go throughout the year, as well as being socially responsive to the demographics that are in our schools. So we kick off the lesson with a powerpoint presentation that brings in living artists that are spotlighted and featured. It brings in different techniques. It has kind of a thread of different elements of art and principles of design that the students are building on each month.

And then that leads into a hands-on project. So one of my favorite examples of projects was a few years ago, we had Altea Narici, who is a world renowned cellist. We worked on spectrograms which are a visual representation of sound and communication. So the students studied animal vocalizations, including birds and aquatic mammals. They listened to them and drew their own spectrograms. Then Altea played her cello and she just improv played. The students played it and drew different pictures of what the spectrograms were that they were hearing from her. Then they lined up, held up the things that they drew, and she read them back and played them on her cello, like sheet music, back to the students.

Chávez: So this is not just your everyday art class and it’s not necessarily just visual arts. You’re doing multi-media arts education. That’s so cool. And I want to ask you specifically about one thing that you said, which is that you offer the same lesson to kids of different ages, which is so interesting. So you have a kindergartner and an eighth grader and they’re learning the same thing but geared like in a different age-appropriate way. How do you think about doing that? What do you see students of different ages bringing to the lesson? Cause that sounds so interesting.

Perry: That’s a wonderful question. And we actually get that question quite frequently. Oftentimes in school you’ll have lessons that are curated to just that particular grade level. And so when students go home and they’re communicating about their day, there’s not as much intergenerational sharing. That is specifically what our lessons meet. It gives you tools for each student in a family to go home and be able to commune about what they were learning that day.

So for example, let’s start with something really basic. If we’re talking about lines and shapes, a kindergardener might come in and really be focusing on just how to build those lines and shapes and the geometry behind those creations. Whereas an eighth grader might come in, take those lines and shapes and think about how to combine those to make a portrait or how to combine those to express something that I’m experiencing emotionally in my day. And it’s the ways that we present the tools. The grade specific part of it is elevated by bringing in those social emotional components.

Dennis: When we started the program in 2020, we were serving two Tillamook County schools with about 500 K-8 students. Flashing forward to this upcoming school year, we’ll be serving 5,000 kids across Clatsop, Tillamook and Lincoln Counties, 17 participating schools, and nine school districts. So just taking that example that Leeauna shared, it’s almost like an Everybody Reads program. So when we bring a lesson in for the month, students of all ages, all across our 150-mile geography, are all having a shared cultural experience together. It gives me goosebumps to think about it.

Chávez: And it sounds like building on arts literacy and understanding. So students are going to continue getting more out of it as they age into this program.

Perry: That’s exactly what it is. And we see when students go through our program because we have a unique lesson every month and then we don’t repeat lessons. So when they come in as a preschooler, they’re going to get a unique lesson until they matriculate out as an eighth grader. Their retention level from fall 2023 when they come back, they remember in fall 2024 what they learned because we’re hitting on so many different levels and abilities to touch different sensory factors. The students are really retaining that information from year to year.

Chávez: Alison, you talked a little bit about all the different schools that you are serving with this program. I believe they are all Title-1 schools, which means 95% of the students qualify for free and reduced price meal programs. And at least 20% of students are either homeless or housing insecure. What power do you think art holds for low income and marginalized students, specifically?

Dennis: I’ll absolutely have Leeauna chime in. She does so much work with our student bodies in person. When you think about a person of any age going through hard times in their life struggles, having healthy, safe, secure places and opportunities to express your feelings, share your own background or life story and then be in a supportive environment where other people are listening to you from a place of empathy in the classroom is one of the most important parts. Often I think people think of arts education as just a learning ground for future professional artists. But we all benefit so much from being able to express ourselves constructively, listen to others express themselves, and develop empathy for people from different backgrounds.

Perry: Absolutely. I think when we first started taking on this program, we didn’t realize the impact that we would have on the need that was out there. One of the things that came out of COVID was the veil being dropped. A lot of educators struggled, kids struggled, families struggled. And what happened out is of that was educators realized and saw a new platform, a new landscape of teaching. We can’t speak for kids anymore. We need to have them speaking for themselves.

They need to have more voice, more choice.

And that was one of the things that one lesson really brought out by giving students a new avenue for communication. We have kids that are emerging bilinguals. We have kids that are in preschool that don’t have the vocabulary yet. But through art as a medium for communication, and for creativity and exploration, they’re able to talk about things that are the barriers they’re experiencing at home in a totally new way. And people are listening. They are able to start conversations that they couldn’t start before.

Dennis: When I interview young artists in the program about is art in school important, or why art is art in school important, they immediately speak to the social and emotional well-being aspects of arts education access. A 7th grader I interviewed last year shared the insight that many kids don’t know how to communicate or share their feelings. But through art they can.

Chávez: Yeah, it’s a way to interpret the world. So that’s so cool to hear you both speak about that. I mean talking about social and emotional benefits, do either of you have memories from your education of a time when arts were really meaningful to you in that way?

Dennis: I can share that I came from a low income household but I have college educated parents and there were always art supplies in my home and in the schools I attended. The arts were just a natural part of my upbringing. So as an Oregonian now, and learning more each day through our partnerships with the rural communities and schools we’re serving, it’s eye opening to me just what a privilege that experience was and how much opportunity and need there is in our state to meet kids where they are in rural parts of the state and bring highest quality arts education into their lives and schools and their teacher’s lives too.

Perry: Art was always something that was available when I was in my youngest grades. I personally am a musician. So music was something that definitely got me through every day. But I think that while I had a lot of advantages and could tap into art as kind of a mainstream of my life, there were friends of mine that art was the only reason that they came to school. It was the only thing that kept them in school. And it was, for a lot of my friends especially as we got in the high school ages, the only reason they graduated.

As we matriculated out of high school, that’s when a lot of the budget cuts started to take place. That’s when I saw my brother or my nieces and nephews coming into school now where art is maybe an elective but often not even present in the schools. So those kids that would have been lost in my generation, they are getting lost now and they aren’t graduating. So having this ability to provide art of all different mediums in schools is what’s getting kids to the next day.

And to see that there is a next day.

Dennis: When we met with Lincoln County principals earlier this spring in advance of the school year, the principal at Toledo Elementary, who piloted the program last year, was sharing with their fellow principals that when Sitka K-8 Create program comes to school, those are the days that she knows no one’s going to be sent to her office for disciplinary issues because nobody wants to miss art.

Chávez: Yeah, I don’t blame them. I want to dive a little bit more into some of these lessons. But first, this program is seeing a lot of demand. How does a school go through the process of hooking up with y’all? What do districts or educators need to do if they are maybe listening to this interview right now and saying, “Wow, this sounds really cool”?

Dennis: There is so much need and far more than Sitka can meet at our current size right now. For this upcoming school year we’re really focused on serving and partnering with the 17 schools we’ll be serving this year, with excellence. Learning by doing and hopefully creating a model that, if wanted and needed, we’ll be able to scale to other rural parts of the state.

Perry: And I think that another thing is we aren’t the final solution. If people want art in school, they need to speak up about it. They need to tell their administrators. They need to tell their superintendents. They need to tell everyone around them that this is something that they value, that’s important to them. And then there’s the financial support and there’s all the other pieces. But if you talk about the need and talk about the want, that’s when it’ll come to everybody.

Chávez: Let’s get into that a little bit. What do you, either of you, think is needed in terms of the support for arts education in rural districts across the state, including the ones that you’re serving?

Dennis: What we’re learning is that the reason art isn’t there or isn’t everywhere isn’t because schools, administrators, teachers don’t value art. It’s because everything and everyone is just stretched too thin. With new kinds of funding for arts access in the state, I think there are all kinds of organizations, ours included, that could rise up to meet this need, partner with schools in their local communities and really create a very vibrant and dynamic rural arts ecosystem.

Perry: Absolutely.

Chávez: We were talking a little bit more about the social and emotional benefits of these programs. I want to ask you, Leeauna, what kinds of emotions are coming out in these classes for students? We’ve talked about joy. We’ve talked about struggles. What are you seeing through this art and through just being in class with students?

Perry: I see everything. The nice part about the role that we fill as art instructors is we really get to bring something in that the kids feel excited and honored and privileged to be able to participate in. And they’re in a very safe space. So we have everything from a kid who gets their first art kit that maybe has only operated with a pencil at home. And they say, “This is the best day of my life. No,” and they stop me, “No, you don’t understand. This is the best day of my entire life.” And they say it in a way that you know they’re actually being very honest about that.

And then when you flip to the other side of the gamut, there are students that really need this program as a way to talk about the really, really, really hard things that are going on in their life.

We did a lesson that featured Betty LaDuke, a very well known artist from the Ashland region. She had a Turtle Wisdom series that she was creating during the pandemic. And so we spotlighted her as a living artist and did a project. One of her pieces was called Turtle Homelessness. I was in a third grade classroom, we were just gearing up, I started the lesson and in through the door rolls, very frantically, this third grade boy. He’s throwing his stuff on the wall, comes in, turns around, immediately sees that we’re in the lesson, sees me up there, and he knew that this is Sitka Art Day so he goes to his seat and sits down. We got to the page of our powerpoint that had turtle homelessness.

And when we do our presentations, they’re very interactive with the students. So I put this slide up, opened it up for a communication asking “What do you guys see? What do you think the symbolism represents?” And that little boy who had rolled in, raised his hand kind of timidly said, “When I look at that, I think about why I was late today. I came in late because I was selecting what items from home I getta keep because next week I will be living in my car.” And I said okay.

Again, we try to make a very safe space to let them talk and share. And he said, “When I look at that, the circle with the lines in the center at the bottom that look kind of like a cross to me, that looks like a window of a house that maybe someday I’ll have.”

And this little girl next to him had been sitting there. This was a lesson we did in January. So she’d been sitting next to him for four or five months. She turned and as he was speaking, her mouth dropped and she just hung on every single word like she saw him for the very first time. And so we moved on and listened to other kids share. And throughout the rest of the lesson, she scooted closer and closer. You could see empathy developing. She didn’t ask him about what was going on. She was engaged in the art that he was making. She was having a conversation as if she was talking to somebody who was now her best friend that she really truly wanted to know. And that relationship continued. And the whole environment in that classroom elevated, following that, through the rest of the year. That’s just one example. But that was replicated through so many of our classrooms, especially with that lesson in particular.

Dennis: That kind of example and learning doesn’t happen when art is just a video that we put on to learn about an artist or maybe watch something while the classroom teacher is doing something else or getting ready for the next session. Really having dedicated time for real art instructors to come in, work with students one on one, ask them questions, be curious about what they’re making, and what it means to them. That’s the kind of experience we’re striving to create in the classrooms that we’re reaching this fall.

Chávez: Just a last question for either of you. Where do you hope to see this arts program go in the next say 5 years, 10 years in the future?

Dennis: I would love it if every rural Title 1 school in Oregon that wanted a program, ours or a program like ours, could have access to one. California, in 2022, passed Proposition 28 which is a proposition that guarantees funding for arts and music in schools. Would love to collaborate over the next five years with educators and legislators in Oregon to see how Sitka can be part of the solution and an example that legislators can look to for inspiration.

Perry: Yeah, she really summed it up. Art for all is really our goal.

Chávez: Art for all. What a wonderful note to end on. Alison and Leeauna, thank you so much for joining us to talk about art today.

Dennis: Thanks Jenn for the conversation.

Perry: Thank you Jenn and thank you to all the people listening too.

Chávez: Yeah, thanks to all of you, too. Alison Dennis is the executive director of the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology. And Leeauna Perry is the Sitka Center’s youth program director.

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