Getting Arts School Off the Drawing Board

“Maaaaaaaaaaaaiiillllllssssss Davis!” shouts Erin Trefry.

“Maaaaaaaaaaaaiiillllllssssss Davis!” reply 20 first graders.

Again, urges Trefry, but somewhat differently.

“Myyyyyylllllllllllllllllllzzzzzzz Daaaaavis!” the students cry.

Singing out the names of jazz greats is one way that students warm up for art class at McKinley School, a new arts-oriented Pasadena public school for kindergarten through eighth grade. Under their teacher’s guidance, the students move from the voice exercise to dancing and then painting, two activities that Trefry sees as closely connected. This is a teacher who talks to third-graders about the abstract artist Wassili Kandinsky -- and then asks them to apply his concept that you can hear color and see sound.

Such high-level arts instruction was supposed to be a main drawing card at McKinley, one of the most closely watched new school projects in Southern California. But despite Trefry’s classes, much of the school’s arts curriculum appears to be still in warm-up.

Pasadena’s schools superintendent, Percy Clark, personally called for the new arts campus as the vanguard of an effort to bring back to the city’s public schools the many middle-class parents who have chosen private and parochial campuses. While McKinley is a neighborhood school, slightly more than half of its students are transfers from other Pasadena areas; of those, school officials say “several dozen” came from private schools.

Since opening in September, McKinley -- which uses the site and the name of a long-shuttered campus near the Pasadena Playhouse -- has been dogged by poor planning and a variety of start-up problems, according to parents, teachers and students.

Textbooks showed up late or not at all. The 850-student school struggled to fill all its teaching posts, leaving little time for training and curriculum development. The school lacked money for supplies and musical instruments (although Clark donated a violin). Trefry said she has picked through trash bins for supplies.

Parents and students complained about a failure to enforce discipline -- in hallways and occasionally in the audience during student performances. Some parents have expressed disappointment that the school is more traditional public school than “Fame”-style conservatory.

Frustrated, about 20 parents have taken their children out.

Earlier this month, Clark acted. Only three months after the school’s opening, he replaced the first principal, Douglas Newton, with Irene Quinones, a more seasoned principal from the Hacienda-La Puente School District. While Quinones has been embraced by some teachers and parents, others have called for Newton’s reinstatement.

“There’s a lot of turmoil,” said Calvin House, who took his two daughters out of private St. Mark’s school to enter them in McKinley’s fifth-grade class. “But I’m optimistic that, with time, it’ll take more shape. Unless something happens, we plan to keep our daughters here.”

All sides agree that the confusion has slowed efforts to develop the arts elements. A new parents’ group has begun meeting to do something about that. James Smith, the PTA vice president, says the group has commitments from about a dozen arts groups to help with instruction; he hopes that McKinley classes will routinely link academic subjects with the arts during the second semester.

“It is not brain surgery,” Smith said. “But right now, the only example of this linking of the arts is Erin Trefry.”

Trefry is not even a full-time teacher. She is one of a handful of arts “consultants,” paid for two days a week. But Trefry -- a painter who trained at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, Maryland Institute College of Art, in New York and internationally -- is at McKinley nearly every day. She uses it as a base for teaching in a half-dozen schools and programs across Southern California.

In trying to mix arts and academics, Trefry and her mother, Judy, who mentors McKinley teachers in introducing arts into their classes, say the school has had a few successes.

During its classroom unit on the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, the students listened and danced to music of the time in Erin Trefry’s classroom, and tried out painting styles of the time. In the third grade, students will make quilts -- satisfying state requirements for math (geometry) and social studies (learning about communities and symbols). Both Trefrys say they are developing arts lessons that can dovetail with the highly structured Open Court reading program.

Ellen Jorgensen, a seventh-grader, said a history lesson was enlivened by portraying characters in ancient Rome. Her science lessons on light and color have been supplemented by painting and art lessons. In Erin Trefry’s exercise inspired by Kandinsky, the instructor whispered a sound (“Buga Wuga,” for example) and asked students to paint whatever shape it inspired. The resulting paintings were used as a stage set for a jazz benefit concert by the pianist Billy Childs and a sextet Saturday night at the school.

“This is about knowing your body and the physicality of art,” Trefry said.

When first-grade teacher Isaac Huang brought his class into Trefry’s room, they began -- to the music of Miles Davis -- with an intense warm-up, switching from dance step to dance step. The only break in the atmosphere came when Trefry checked the first-graders’ shoelaces and paused to make sure no students, in their dancing excitement, had wet their pants.

Near the end, she turned the class over to Darlene Wilson, a first-grader who had created her own dance move. It involved extending both arms in a curl and skipping, right foot over left.

Some students had trouble following along, and Darlene briefly fought back tears.

“It’s always hard when you’re first starting out at something,” Trefry said. “That applies to teaching and just about anything.”

Soon Darlene had her classmates following along. And 20 first-graders did her new dance step all the way out the door and down the hall back to class.