Students Help Fill Art Void

Natick Bulletin & Tab, 5/2/03

By Shannon Haley Daggett, Staff Writer

Reprinted with permission from the Natick Bulletin & Tab

(May 2, 2003) – Imagine an MCAS test asking a group of students of different grades and two very different schools to come together to make something out of brown paper, masking tape and some paint.

It’s an unlikely scenario.

Art advocates have long said that MCAS is drying up the arts and music programs in public schools and to get arts back into the curriculum takes more creativity than ever before.
Enter a program by the National Arts and Learning Collaborative where high school students from the prestigious and private Walnut Hill School mentor Marshall Elementary School students in Dorchester in creative writing, theatre, visual arts, and music.

The point of the three-year-old program, said Walnut Hill English teacher Steve Durning, is for the private school – which is one of only three independent high schools for the arts nationwide – to share with a public school that is lacking in resources in the arts.

Walnut Hill students majoring in creative writing helped the students write a newspaper. Theatre majors developed a skit with the Marshall students on behavior and social issues that children face today while other students created a CD with the help of music theory majors of a day in the life of a Marshall Elementary student.

Walnut Hill students majoring in visual arts visited the Dorchester school with about $500 worth of brown paper and masking paper to build a sculpture of their choice.

“Here’s the paper and here’s the tape. They have to problem solve in a very real-life way,” Durning said.

It takes independent thinking and collaboration to figure out what will work and won’t work, the teacher added. And the pressure to make it work is the public opinion.

“There is that discipline of public audience. You don’t want your work to be awful or you will be shamed,” he said.

Senior Brenna Flynn and a classmate got together with a half-dozen children to sculpt what she describes as a geodesic dome.

It’s like a play hut, she said, with a burlap dome cover and a door. The dome can fit about six people.

“The kids could do everything. There wasn’t anything the kids weren’t capable of doing,” she said.

Meanwhile, freshman Lucy Churchill and her classmate met with another small group of students to build their own sculpture. They all decided they wanted to make an animal, but couldn’t quite agree on what animal.

It turned out to be a hybrid of a dragon, unicorn and tiger “so everyone was happy,” she said.
Meredith Eppel, executive director of the National Arts & Learning Collaborative, said these creative projects benefit the older students as well for they learn how to be a strong mentor and role model, and possibly this experience will lead them into a career in teaching.

National Arts & Learning Collaborative is a nonprofit organization that started just over three years ago at Walnut Hill School, though it is a separate entity from the school. Its first main project was the partnership with the Marshall Elementary School.

The late Sally Whitaker was a close friend to staff at Walnut Hill and taught at Marshall.
“She was very influential…always wondered if Walnut kids could connect with Marshall kids,” Eppel said.

She passed away a year ago and a memorial fund was created in her memory. Proceeds go directly to the partnership program.

“They could have used it for MCAS training, this showed how they really wanted the program,” she said.

Some students may have an untapped talent that won’t get discovered in schools where art resources are hard to come by, Durning said.

Head of the Walnut School Stephanie Perrin said this partnership program exposes the elementary students to “a whole new vocabulary of expression, meaning, they identify their talents, and perhaps develop them and get the parents involved… A parent may not come to a parent teacher night, but they may go see their child perform.”

Eppel said her organization hopes to attract more partnerships. They are currently working with Brimmer and May School, an independent K-12 school located in Chestnut Hill, to have their
students mentor children enrolled at Sumner Elementary School in Roslindale.