SALT LAKE CITY (March 11, 2010)-Friends of Art Works for Kids today announced that the 2010 Utah legislature provided sufficient funding to the Beverley Taylor Sorenson Arts Learning Program to keep arts specialists in all 53 schools for another year. Faced with legislative funding cuts from the 2009 budget, the innovative arts education program-judged highly effective by parents, educators, and administrators-will economize in areas other than reducing the number of arts specialists.
"We are grateful to Governor Herbert and the Utah legislature for their responsiveness to the request of parents, teachers and administrators who know the value these arts specialists bring to our schools and the children they serve," said long-time arts education advocate Beverley Taylor Sorenson. "In difficult economic times like the present, it takes vision and courage to support educational opportunities such as these. This program makes a measurable difference in the lives of children and we are thrilled it will continue for another year."
The 2008 legislature approved four years of funding for arts specialists in more than 50 Utah elementary schools for the Beverley Taylor Sorenson Arts Learning Program (BTSALP), named by the legislature in honor of Sorenson, who has spent 15 years and significant financial resources developing and championing the program. The four-year funding was designed to allow educators and state leaders time to rigorously and objectively document the effectiveness of the BTSALP, in which trained arts specialists work in close partnership with classroom teachers to integrate art into the core subjects of math, science, language and social studies. This side-by-side teaching model has proven effective at assisting in improving a child's academic performance, motivation and behavior.
In 2009, legislators cut roughly 37 percent of the allocated money in response to the ongoing economic downturn that began in late 2007. These cuts would have eliminated arts specialists for the 2010-11 school year.
Friends of Art Works for Kids, a grassroots organization, launched an advocacy effort in September 2009 to help restore the program's funding-rallying support from parents and educators of the 30,000 elementary school children who would have been affected, and signing up more than 10,000 to contact their legislators. Educators and parents of children supporting the BTSALP told their state representatives the evidence already strongly suggests students' core curriculum test scores are significantly up, while behavior problems are sharply down. Research commissioned by the legislature and performed by the Utah Education Policy Center through the four-year program will further solidify this evidence.
Gov. Gary Herbert proposed $1.3 million in funding for the Beverley Taylor Sorenson program in the 2010 budget. The legislature chose to reduce this appropriation to $658,000, which along with the $2.8 million remaining from the initial funding will be enough to fund arts specialists for the third year of the evaluation period. The successful effort to appropriate the funding for the program was led by two prominent Utah legislative leaders: House Speaker David Clark and Senate President Michael Waddoups.
"We will be back next year," said Sorenson. "Thousands of parents, teachers and administrators have communicated to their legislators that this program is too important and effective to cut before completion of the four-year evaluation period. This program works because it teaches children math, science and reading using the arts as a method they already love. They sing, they dance, and they draw. This is what they do and they love it."
About Friends of Art Works for Kids
Friends of Art Works for Kids (www.artworksforkids.org) is a grassroots initiative created to ensure that Utah's school children receive the benefits of high-quality, integrated arts instruction through the Beverley Taylor Sorenson Arts Learning Program. Using the Art Works for Kids teaching model, the program integrates art into the core curriculum, effectively increasing student performance in every subject-from language arts and social studies to math and science.
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