For the past 15 years, I’ve had the good fortune to teach visual arts at Webster Elementary School. Of the three careers that I have worked thus far, it has been the most rewarding. So, it is with a very heavy heart that I say farewell to all my past and present colleagues, students and their parents. I won’t be in the Webster Art Studio this year, but that was not my choice.
Our school district, under the guise of “fairness,” has usurped the funds raised by parents to pay for arts programs in their neighborhood elementary schools. Instead, the district has used some of those funds and contracted with P.S Arts, a nonprofit organization outside the district to provide SMMUSD elementary schools with visual arts instructors (who may not necessarily be credentialed teachers). The same applies to vocal music instructors and dramatic arts instructors. Currently employed arts teachers, like me, were told by the district to re-apply for their positions to P.S. Arts and that such teachers would be given preference.
P.S. Arts would provide part-time art instruction in any or all of the three arts disciplines (30 hours per student, per year, per school), but preferred to hire full-time art instructors, who would teach five or more classes per day in two or three different schools each week. Given the amount of prep time that high-quality visual arts instruction requires, as well as set-up time and clean-up time, only a very simplified arts curriculum is possible when teaching so many students in so many classes in several different schools. I would not teach under such restraints.
Perhaps in the not-too-distant future, if Malibu should manage to break away and form its own district, there might be a way to recreate the meaningful art instruction that Malibu parents and this entire community have supported and that students at Webster have participated in these past 15 years. Until such a time, I offer these words of Jacob Bronowski on the importance of art in both education and human life: “Every animal leaves traces of what it was; man alone leaves traces of what he created.”
Diane C. Hines