Creative Solutions : Lovers of the Arts Work Hard to Keep School Programs Alive

This unlikely temple to the arts in Compton hardly looks worth fighting for.

Four drab, beaten-down school buildings squat near a crumbling asphalt playground against a background of small homes with barred windows to the north and colorless industrial buildings to the south.

The school, without so much as a name, is usually referred to by the address, 1420 N. McKinley Ave. Many windows are painted over. Pine boards cover openings where the glass is gone.

But parents have stormed into Compton school board meetings, shouted at board members and threatened to pull their children from the school district when officials have talked about closing the school or slashing its budget.

They want to protect what goes on inside.

Into this stark setting, hundreds of youngsters have come after school for the tonic of music and art. They left gang-plagued neighborhoods and other troubles to finger a violin, raise a handbell, sing in pressed robes and kick their legs high and straight.

“My daughter, when she started taking dance classes, had problems in school,” said Sandra Johnson, the mother of 12-year-old Kortney. “Her success here has followed over into her academic work. She is now in classes for the gifted and talented. On her last report card she had four A’s and two Bs.”

For the Johnsons and others, 1420 N. McKinley is a vital outpost of culture. Supporters have fought an ongoing, sometimes losing battle to maintain funding for its programs during wave after wave of school district budget cuts.

The struggle is symbolic of the pressures being faced and often surmounted by those who view as essential an education in the arts.

Throughout the Southeast area, hard economic times have felled music and art programs, but have also brought out the best from lovers of music and art, who have become masters at the art of getting by with less.

In Montebello, students share instruments, wash their own band uniforms and forgo cherished field trips, but stick with their music. In Long Beach, teachers organize extra music contests and art programs on their own time. Some dig into their pockets to buy instruments, pay for repairs and provide other supplies. Regular classroom teachers, already burdened by large classes, are taking a stab at teaching music and art in Lakewood. And artists and arts organizations, such as the Long Beach Symphony Orchestra, are reaching into schools with opera, ballet and classical music to develop the performers and audience of tomorrow.

A look at some of the battlefronts:

The most recent assault on the program at 1420 N. McKinley occurred last July when the Compton Unified School District came under state control as a result of a budget crisis. With more than $19 million in debts and officials handing out dozens of pink slips and proposing across-the-board pay cuts, it didn’t take long for administrators to start slashing programs.

The district saved hundreds of thousands of dollars by eliminating the specialists who taught dance, music and drama during the school day in the elementary and middle schools.

The district was also poised to eliminate the after-school classes at McKinley--an arts program that supporters had literally built from the ground up.

Parents had constructed a raised dance floor in one classroom so children would not have to dance on concrete. In other rooms, they erected risers for a chorus and a band.

A former kindergarten became a mini-auditorium when a donor contributed seats from an old Los Angeles-area theater. The tattered seats desperately needed new covers, so families adopted one seat apiece to restore--a substantial commitment in the economically depressed city. When a seat was finished, the donating family was honored with a nameplate on the back of the chair.

“Just like the Music Center,” program coordinator Joyce R. Jones said. Enrollment grew as high as 200 students, Jones said.

When the latest threat came, Sandra Johnson and other parents made a last-ditch appeal. They found an ally in Assistant Supt. Lilly B. Nelson, who persuaded officials that the after-school program could be funded from a portion of money set aside by law for gifted and talented students.

But they came away with only a partial victory. The current $34,000 budget is about $15,000 less than what the program operated on last year. The after-school program also lost most of its staff members, who had been full-time arts teachers during the school day. They left for jobs elsewhere when their full-time positions were eliminated.

The current skeleton staff consists mainly of regular classroom teachers, who do extra duty after school teaching music and drama for $19 an hour. Without the full-time music, dance and drama teachers in the schools to spot and recruit talent, enrollment after school has dropped to about 90 students, Jones said.

Jones, a Compton teacher for 33 years, used to administer the arts program full time. The budget cutters reassigned her to teach second grade at Kennedy Elementary school.

At the end of classes, however, she hurries to the McKinley site to work in the after-school program.

“I don’t want to see it die. What if I said no and (officials) just said, ‘Forget it’ ?”

*

When hard times hit the Montebello school district, band leader Leonard Narumi bought five saxophones, two clarinets, two flutes, two piccolos, one sousaphone and numerous accessory items such as drumsticks and drumheads. The saxes alone cost about $3,500.

It was either buy the instruments and then lend them out or see some students in his prize-winning Schurr High School band give up music.

Narumi said he has few other financial obligations. “I have no wife, no life, just my two brothers, my mother and the cat. And the cat died.”

Uniforms have also been hard to come by. Narumi’s band students purchased their own white pants to go along with a minimal supply of school-provided band jackets. “We share the jackets or have a rotation for wearing them,” he said.

The band ran short of uniforms in 1992 before its first appearance in the Rose Parade, so the percussion section wore a completely different outfit, which band members paid for themselves. At other performances, as many as a dozen students have had to sit out because of the uniform shortage.

To raise money for equipment and other expenses, students and their parents wash cars, market Tupperware, sell cookies and fry pancake breakfasts. They organize at least five different fund-raising projects a year, more than ever.

Even so, field trips are virtually out of the question. The band used to travel all over the country, but not even bus rides to local football games are free anymore.

That costs $60 a year.

Narumi’s plight is not unique in Montebello Unified, a cash-strapped school district that has slashed arts and music programs that formerly received generous support.

The district saved more than $120,000 by abandoning its partnership with the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu. The museum used to train teachers about art so they could pass on this knowledge to students. The program included an evening when elementary students displayed their skills by acting as tour guides at the Getty Museum.

Montebello Unified once dedicated an entire building for administrators and teachers who ran music and arts programs. One room was a makeshift studio where musicians recorded samples of classic works as well as their own compositions for classroom use. The entire building is now locked up.

“When their last work day ended they shut the file drawers, turned off the lights, turned on the alarm and left,” said business manager Glenn J. Sheppard. “It’s depressing to walk in there.”

The district ended funding for new instruments and even cut the staff of those who repair them.

So Narumi became an instrument collector.

Now if he could only master baton-twirling. The reductions also took away the teacher who used to lead the drill and flag teams, leaving that task to Narumi as well.

“It’s very distracting,” Narumi said of his added chores. “I have to take time out to set up the fund-raisers in class when I really should be teaching music.”

But he adds: “It would be even more difficult to let the program go.”

*

Bill Heynen’s job as master wood sculpture teacher is getting harder.

Because of district budget cuts, Heynen’s sculpture classes at Montebello High have grown from 24 to 32 students. It’s difficult to manage the larger classes when each student works at a different level on an individual project.

So he moves more quickly from desk to desk, giving pointers above a maddening din of mallets striking poplar, willow and mahogany and the hum of an electric oscillating sander.

Budget cuts have eliminated two of his five woodcarving classes. They’ve been replaced with general math classes, where he has to teach sixth-grade math to high-schoolers who care little about school.

Retirement looks more and more appealing to the 55-year-old teacher until he considers students such as Fernando Martinez, a 16-year-old junior who captured first-place ribbons in his age group for wood sculpture and wood sculpture creativity at last year’s state fair.

Heynen’s students have claimed 217 awards at the state fair since 1966.

Martinez said that Heynen’s class was the main reason that some students stayed in school. “Sometimes his students don’t want to go to other classes, but they like this class a lot,” Martinez said.

*

Helen Scott, a third-grade teacher in Long Beach Unified, recalls when music teachers visited her classroom every week. They kept alive a district tradition by teaching her students how to play the recorder, a simple flute-like instrument.

Scott learned to play the recorder to sneak in extra lessons for students. Now, she has volunteered to be the main attraction because the music teachers can stop by only a handful of times a year.

Long Beach administrators have frozen the number of music teachers since at least 1988, even though student enrollment has increased by 10,000 students over that period to about 75,000 students. The school board considered a staff proposal to save money by cutting all instrumental music teachers from the elementary schools two years ago, but dropped the idea under intense protest.

In Scott’s class at Burcham Elementary in Lakewood, 30 students sit ramrod-straight, recorders poised inches below lips, eyes glued to a sheet of music projected on a white screen.

“Say the names of the notes to yourself. Think of where your fingers are going to go,” she tells them. “One, two, ready, play . . .”

Thirteen valiant squeaks later, it is over.

“An A+,” 8-year-old Tessa Petrich says approvingly.

And just like that, “Hot Cross Buns” is conquered.

“The music puts all students on an equal footing,” Scott said later. More than a third of the school’s students speak limited English, but “it does not matter whether they can speak English or not,” she said. “They can all learn to play the recorder.”

*

With a sweep of his hands, Robert Frelly signals students to begin an excerpt from Copland’s “Appalachian Spring.” Frelly, assistant conductor of the Long Beach Symphony Orchestra, stands before more than 70 of the finest high school musicians from the Long Beach public schools at Wilson High School.

The instruments falter, so Frelly tries again, and again--guiding students through the piece gently, but firmly.

“If you don’t have the melody, play softer so we hear the melody coming through at all times,” Frelly says. “First clarinet, just a hair faster than that. Violins, make sure the vibrato starts before the first note. Check the third note, trombone, it should be G sharp.”

Frelly is preparing the students for a first-ever, side-by-side performance with the symphony’s own musicians Feb. 9-10 at the Terrace Theater in Long Beach.

The symphony is among a number of arts organizations trying to fill the void in public school arts and music programs. In all, the symphony spends $250,000 a year, 10% of its budget, on education programs. That’s three times what it spent five years ago.

“The resources of schools have shrunk in the past two decades; the demands placed on them are tremendous,” said Mary Newkirk, executive director of the symphony. “Our role is to serve our community by sharing the unique artistic resource of this symphony with our schools and their students.”

Less than 30 minutes into the rehearsal with Frelly, 51 strings, 10 woodwinds, 11 brasses and three percussionists begin to create something recognizable and even beautiful.

Frelly’s arm thrusts out and the violins sing. His fingers beckon and the volume rises.

The eyes of violinist Zhelinrentice Scott follow his every move. She’s studied the violin for six years. She tries to practice at least two hours a day. She endured an arduous audition to win her seat and will add seven two-hour rehearsals to her schedule to prepare for this concert.

“The way some people feel about sports, I feel about music,” said the 15-year-old 10th-grader from Polytechnic High.

*

In Compton, at the school with no name, 12-year-old Kortney Johnson now helps teach the dance class that had given her the discipline and confidence to become an honors student. She’s filling in while the stripped-down after-school program searches for a permanent instructor. Her mother chaperons the class, sweeps the floor--whatever is needed.

Kortney’s students include seventh-grader Anthony Gillespie, who used to get bored spending his afternoons at home.

“I like it,” he said. “You get to flip around, doing that ballet stuff, with your leg coming up in the air like this.”

He also takes the drama class and is learning to play handbells, the guitar, drums and keyboards.

“It’s good to have things like this where kids can have fun,” he said. “Isn’t that what school’s all about?”

Cuts in Art, Music Programs District: Compton Unified

1993: Ended most music, dance and drama instruction, kindergarten-eighth grade. Savings :800,000

1992: Reduced funding to after-school arts classes. Savings: $15,000 District: Long Beach Unified*

1988: Froze elementary music teacher positions despite increasing enrollment. Savings: $75,000

1992: Cut music coordinator. Savings: $75,000 Montebello Unified

1991: Cut two elementary music teachers, reduced budget for piano accompanists, reduced art supplies, reduced Getty Museum art program. Savings: $105,500

1992: Eliminated music specialists, both middle school choral music teachers and remainder of Getty program. Closed arts administration building. Savings: $200,000+

*Long Beach has opened an elementary school with a focus on art and music education. Extra services and equipment are paid through grants. Source: Individual school districts