Making Do : The budget crunch forces music, studio and speech teachers and students to make do with ever less. But they haven’t given up.

In Camarillo, a speech teacher rewards her students with trophies her husband has reconditioned in the garage. In Ventura, an art teacher struggles to keep her personal spending on student materials under $1,000 a year. In Thousand Oaks, a music teacher covers half of her program’s costs by having students peddle gourmet fruit.

For well over a decade, teachers of the arts in Ventura County have lived in a frugal world. But now, threatened by a state budget crisis that has brought deep cuts to education, those teachers and their programs are making do with less than ever before.

* In a move to save about $150,000, the Oxnard Elementary School District in August eliminated its three elementary school music teaching jobs. One music teacher remains to be shared between the district’s two intermediate schools, and the district’s last visual arts specialist position vanished in 1987.

* In Camarillo, the Pleasant Valley Elementary School District abandoned its band program earlier this year, then revived it after a community group proposed a plan to cut the program’s cost in half this year and underwrite it with increased donations in years to come.

* Ojai Unified School District officials last year dropped funding for the district’s elementary school choral music program. Some schools and volunteers scraped up funds to sustain a more modest version of the program, some didn’t.

“The school districts have to get into more creative ways to support those programs,” says Pamela Martens, assistant superintendent of the Ojai district.

According to Jeanne Adams, administrator of curriculum and instructional services for the Oxnard district, until the current budget squeeze relaxes, school arts programs “are going to be highly dependent, and increasingly dependent, on community resources.” Often, it’s up to teachers to recruit those resources.

The arts aren’t entirely a charity case yet. Administrators note that under the state’s core curriculum guide, schools must cover visual and performing arts at all grade levels. They also point out that the arts are often integrated into classes such as literature and history, making a district’s commitment difficult to measure. And many teachers say they believe administrators and school board members are doing as much as they can.

But at most grade levels, the state sets no specific standards for how much time or money schools should spend on the arts. And even in school districts where administrators voice strong support, money doesn’t necessarily follow.

“The arts have historically been seen as a frill,” laments Betty Lou McBride, a Conejo Valley chorus teacher who last year finished a master’s thesis analyzing the decline of music education in public schools.

McBride’s findings, which agree with the observations of many educators, pinpointed three key factors in the decline of school music. One was the Soviet launching of Sputnik in 1957, which prompted a surge of emphasis on math and sciences in American schools. A second was the gradual rise of standardized testing and increased focus on skills that could be measured more easily. In 1978, there was the passage by California voters of Proposition 13, and the widespread budget cuts that resulted.

“There’s more and more thinking that the arts are supposed to be before school and after school,” says Carol Alexander, a Conejo Valley music teacher who is selling Washington Red Delicious Extra Fancy apples ($18 for a 20-pound crate) to help cover student band expenses. “I would say that it’s possible for the arts to get squeezed right out of the children’s lives.”

Over the last two weeks, Ventura County Life looked in on three Ventura County teachers of the arts as they struggled to cultivate culture in a budgetary drought.