Will the Center Save the Day? : Arts: Although the facility has not been approached, its president says it might be able to help continue a countywide school program.

The Orange County Performing Arts Center may help maintain a public school arts program threatened by the county bankruptcy, center president Tom Tomlinson said this week.

Meanwhile, already expanding their community outreach and education programs to an unprecedented degree, center officials have increased their education budget by about 30% and are co-commissioning a children’s ballet with a local troupe.

“The Bridge to Angel Island,” about a Chinese family’s immigration to the United States, is being commissioned with and for Ballet Pacifica of Laguna Beach for the center’s “From the Center” outreach program.

Traditionally, the program has been funded about 50-50 by the center and participating county public schools. Some 350 performances by local groups are scheduled in 250 schools in 1995, but with school districts standing to lose millions as a result of the bankruptcy, cuts in such programs are being considered.

Tomlinson said that if the schools cannot continue to pay their share, the center “may be required, if we want to continue those programs, to fund them to a greater extent than we do already.

“If the fund-raising climate doesn’t change significantly, and there’s a real need in the community . . . we might be able to identify funding.”

He noted that the privately funded center has not been asked to help out and stressed that any funding it chipped in toward the program would be temporary.

“One of the real problems could be if we . . . begin to be looked to to provide basic (arts) education services,” he said. “That’s not our job. We’re not educators, and we don’t pretend to be, and we don’t want to be. That’s the job and the province of the school districts.”

Meanwhile, according to center spokesman Gregory Patterson, “The Bridge to Angel Island” is the first dance piece the center has co-commissioned, the first piece of any kind it has commissioned for outreach, and it marks the center’s first such partnership with Ballet Pacifica, an emerging regional professional troupe.

Ballet Pacifica initiated the talks that led to the collaboration, according to its outreach coordinator, Jewel Tweten-Donnelly. The center’s participation is part of an effort by Tomlinson, who replaced original center director Thomas R. Kendrick in 1993, to “place a greater emphasis on the center’s education and community programs,” Patterson said. The education budget, which climbs to $631,600 as of the new fiscal year, starting Sunday, is enough to meet the center’s customary share of 200 additional “From the Center” performances, he noted.

The 20-minute ballet for four, with a new score to come from a composer to be named, will be choreographed by Sylvia Turner, dance department chairwoman at Rancho Santiago College in Santa Ana. Tweten-Donnelly said Ballet Pacifica will spend about $5,000 on the work. The center will chip in about $1,500, three times the usual amount it gives to “From the Center” groups, Patterson said.

Tweten-Donnelly said Ballet Pacifica will premiere “The Bridge to Angel Island” during the 1996 Imagination Celebration, a children’s arts festival sponsored by the center and the Orange County Department of Education, and will add the dance to its own outreach repertory to be performed during annual children’s concerts at the Festival Forum Theatre in Laguna Beach.

The center’s only previous co-commission was with the Debussy Trio, for a classical work by jazz composer and keyboardist Lyle Mays, which premiered in the center’s Founders Hall last month. In 1990, the center co-produced a revival of the musical “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” with the La Jolla Playhouse.