School district hosting benefit
SAMOHI For the students who have trouble getting out of bed to face another boring day in class, there’s few better motivational tools that the promise of some visual and performing arts time.
The Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District is known to have one of the best visual and performing arts programs in the state of California, where art advocates say these types of programs are getting slashed more and more each year due to poor state funding. Though the city by the sea offers a myriad of art classes, many say funding is still critically needed to continue the district’s program and to help it flourish, especially for the students who need it most.
The Artists for the Arts Foundation — a non-profit started by internationally renown singer-songwriter Jackson Browne and the locally-based band Venice, and For the Arts — an arm of the district’s Education Foundation, will co-host the fourth annual benefit concert on Saturday night to support the school’s arts programs.
This year’s benefit will feature performances by Browne, singer-songwriter David Crosby, Venice, Grammy award-winning arranger David Campbell and student musicians. The concert will be held in the historic Barnum Hall Theater at Santa Monica High School.
The event brings in about $100,000 to the For the Arts foundation.
“There are statistics that show arts help overall student achievement,” said Linda Gross, executive director of the Education Foundation. “The arts also provide an opportunity for other students who may not be the most academic students to really excel in one of the arts disciplines.”
The arts have given some of the academically uninspired students reason to look forward to come to class.
Gross recalls a student at Samohi last year who never considered attending college until last spring, when the district introduced a pilot dance program at the high school.
The dance programs are now increasingly popular at Malibu High School, Santa Monica High School and Olympic High School.
The student, now a junior attending school outside the SMMUSD, was accepted to a UCLA summer dance institute last year, causing him to ponder college in his future.
“Through his passion for the arts and through this art form he loves, he has the opportunity now to be considered for UCLA (for college),” Gross said.
The district provides music for students in all grade levels, from the dance classes in the high school to the semi-private music lessons in the middle and elementary schools.
“This music program is the envy of the state,”said Tom Whaley,the coordinator of the district’s visual and performing arts program.
When Venice lead singer Kipp Lennon was a student growing up in Venice, a solid arts program was a given in public education, he said. With budget cuts over the past few decades, arts programs are nearly nonexistent in public schools.
Students with art programming in their lives not only perform well in school, they stay out of trouble, Lennon said.
Performing arts also play a role in helping a student build their self-esteem, helping children get up in front of their peers, said Cindy Rosmann, the chairman of the Visual and Performing Arts District Advisory Committee.
“The confidence has impacts across all academic subjects,” Rosmann said.
It was four years ago that Lennon received a call from Browne to see if he was interested in performing in a school benefit concert. The two had performed together around the world over the years.
After the first year, Lennon and Browne, whose children attended the Santa Monica- Malibu Unified School District, decided to start their own non-profit organization to host similar benefit concerts across the state.
The foundation tries to gain corporate sponsors to underwrite the entire cost of producing the event so that the beneficiary could receive 100 percent of the proceeds from ticket sales. This year, the corporate sponsors for the Santa Monica concert are Yahoo! and Intel.
“The main thing is to get involvement from people big enough like Jackson Browne and David Crosby,” Lennon said.“If we go to Phoenix, (maybe we) can get Stevie Nicks, and in Texas, we could get the Dixie Chicks.”
Perhaps one of the most special moments of the benefit for Lennon is when the professional artists bring student musicians on stage to perform together.
“It’s a nice opportunity for some of these kids that play the oboe (for example) in their room to get public acknowledgment and see what a great thing it is to stick with this,” Lennon said. “To get this sort of validation from the crowd of people, for the people to realize there is a tangible example of what we would miss out if we didn’t have this in the public schools.”
The concert will be held at Barnum Hall Theater, 601 Pico Blvd. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. and the show will begin at 8 p.m. Tickets can be purchased online at www.smmef.org.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on June 1, 2007. Read the original PDF.