Council to Consider Reinstating Artist-in-Classroom Funds

The Ventura City Council on Monday night agreed to reconsider its earlier decision to stop financing an innovative program that puts local artists in elementary school classrooms.

The city cut funds for the school district’s popular Artist in the Classroom program earlier this year because of budget constraints.

Councilman Ray Di Guilio, whose wife Jean is a fifth-grade teacher at Loma Vista Elementary School in Ventura, initiated the proposal to reinstate the $3,000 in annual funding after receiving a letter signed by all the teachers at Juanamaria Elementary School.

“If we can support the Chamber Music Festival for $200,000, then it is really a shame we would cut off such a viable program for young people,” Di Guilio said Monday before the meeting. “Arts in the classroom have gone down to almost nothing.”

The council directed city staff to review the program and make a recommendation on whether to reinstate money for the program at a future meeting.

The program began in 1988 as a joint project by the city, Ventura Unified School District and the now-defunct Ventura Arts Council.

The goal of the program is to expose elementary-age children to music, pottery, dance and drama. Teachers and administrators praise the program for teaching youngsters art forms that a shrinking school budget can no longer afford.

Under the program, participating schools pay $375 for local artists to spend eight weeks teaching a certain class once a week.

Of that, the artists receive $275 for teaching. Another $50 goes to buying materials. The remaining $50 goes to administration. The art projects are designed to tie in with the school’s broader teaching curriculum.

Schools from Oak Park to Ventura now participate in the program. Last year, the artists involved taught a total of 264 eight-week courses.

In every school district--except Ventura Unified--local PTAs raised all the money needed for the program. In Ventura, the city had always put up half the money with the PTAs raising the other half.

Brian Bemel, the fine arts specialist for the county superintendent of schools, has lobbied the Ventura council for continued funding.

He said the program will not die without city funding, but he has received calls from some schools that cannot afford to continue the artist residencies without the matching city funds.

Sonia Tower, who administers the residency program for Ventura’s Office of Cultural Affairs, said the city funding was never meant to continue. It was just seed money to expose teachers to the possibilities of involving local artists in their classrooms, she said.