Election Section

Arts Lead Way to Learning At Berkeley Magnet School By JEFF KEARNS

Special to the Planet
Friday February 04, 2005

An elementary school with students dancing and banging on drums might seem to be begging for a strong dose of discipline. But at the Berkeley Arts Magnet school, where the drumming may be Afro-Cuban and the dance a Mexican folk number, the curriculum is based on what elsewhere might be chaos.  

Each year, the school hires visiting artists who teach students how to paint, dance, sing, act, or drum in lessons that are incorporated into other classroom subjects.  

Though some parents send their children to the magnet school because it’s close to home, others rave about the school’s focus on the arts, pointing to the good ways their kids learn and mature.  

“It really cracks open a child’s learning,” says Diana Correia, who chose to send her son and daughter to the school because of the arts focus. Like other parents, Correia said she’s seen the arts program get kids excited about school and motivate them to succeed academically.  

Principal Lorna Skantze-Neill says teachers explain academic concepts by using art-related examples. Music is built around timing. Quarter notes, for example, can also be a handy way to explain the often vexing concept of fractions. “You start making patterns for them,” she says. “They pay particular attention to details, which I believe comes from the arts.” 

Founded as Whittier School in the late 19th Century at Milvia and Virginia streets, the original wood building was replaced in the 1930s by a two-story concrete structure with wide inside corridors, high ceilings, and tall windows that give it an open, airy feel. Whittier became Berkeley Arts Magnet in 1981. 

“The philosophy in the founding of this school,” says Carole Ono, a longtime instructor, is that “arts are part of a basic education, that kids find arts, whether visual or performing, as a way to express themselves.” Students who have trouble with traditional subjects, Ono said, can find other ways to excel in the arts.  

Most of the money for the arts program comes from the Berkeley Schools Excellence Project, a parcel tax first approved by voters in 1986 that now generates more than $10 million a year for enrichment programs and class-size reduction in the Berkeley Unified School District. Voters re-authorized the tax in November.  

At Berkeley Arts Magnet staff and parents form a committee that decides how to use the school’s share of the BSEP money. Committee chair Rachel Greenberg said the school gets $65,000 for the arts from BSEP, but additional fund raising brings the total to about $90,000 a year. 

Last year, the panel spent most of the money on five visiting artists who taught dance, percussion, chorus, drama and visual arts. The artists are hired as classified employees, and receive health care benefits. But this year, Greenberg said, the rising cost of providing those benefits means that the school hired just four visiting artists. Because the BSEP funding level remains fixed, it doesn’t keep pace with the increased cost of benefits, she said.  

Though a new crop of visiting artists is hired at the beginning of each school year, dancer Betty Ladzekpo has been coming back since 1988. Ladzekpo, who studied African music and dance at UC Berkeley, mainly teaches West African dance, but her sessions with students incorporate dance from several cultures.  

Ladzekpo, known as “Miss Betty” in the classroom, said some students respond strongly, citing some who went on to study dance at Berkeley High School and one who became a dance major in college.  

“Parents have told me,” she said, “that ‘every night, they’re practicing this dance in the mirror, or my kindergartener puts on a show for me every night.’” 

 

This is the seventh in a series profiling the Berkeley elementary schools. The reports are written by students of the UC Berkeley Journalism School.ô