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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Buy a Busload of Kids gives students chance to tour WSU museum

Alexandra Graff Murrow News Service

Nearly 50 schoolchildren from Deary, Idaho, crowded into the Washington State University Museum of Art gallery to see some of the world’s most iconic photographs this month.

For many of these students, visiting the university’s art museum may be the only chance they get to see art up close. 

 “I haven’t been to a museum in forever,” said fourth-grader Lakye Taylor, who visited with his school.

 WSU’s Museum of Art offers Eastern Washington and western Idaho schools the opportunity to get out of the classroom and visit the museum to learn about art with its Buy a Busload of Kids program, said Anna Maria Shannon, the museum’s associate director.

 “It’s vital,” Shannon said. “School districts just don’t have the funding anymore. You find a need, you try to fill it.”

 The Buy a Busload of Kids program started in 2003 with a small budget of $500 and worked with the Pullman School District, Shannon said. Today, the program has funded 322 buses from 99 different school districts, reaching more than 15,000 students, Shannon said.

 The program covers the transportation costs to the museum for schools within about 100 miles of the WSU campus, she said. To date, the museum has spent more than $24,000 on the program, she said. Typically, bus costs range from $72 to $350 depending on the class size and distance from campus.

 The late WSU professor Eugene Rosa loved the program and established an endowment for it before he died in 2013, Shannon said. The endowment funds 10 to 20 buses each year.

 Fourth- through sixth-grade students from Deary Elementary School visited the museum’s current exhibit, “Through the Lens: An American Century – Vivian Maier & Corbis” last week. The exhibit showcases famous photographs from the Corbis collection side-by-side with images taken by Vivian Maier, an American street photographer.

 “We live in a low socio-economic community, so coming to a museum, this is the first time some of the students have stepped into a museum,” said Diana Moser, a fifth-grade teacher at Deary.

 Moser said she tries to choose the exhibits that fit well with her lesson plans.

 “We don’t have a separate art program, but we integrate it into our curriculum,” Moser said. “That’s why exposure to art like this is good for them.”

Many of the eligible school districts either don’t offer or have reduced arts programming in recent years, Shannon said.

 Sean Moss, the secondary art teacher at the Tekoa and Rosalia, Washington, school districts, said he likes to take his secondary art students to visit the museum. The students not only experience art up close, but they learn how to act in a gallery setting, he said.

 “For a lot of these kids, they’d have no experience in a professional museum or gallery,” Moss said. “It’s something I think we’ll do every year from here on out as long as it’s funded.”

Seeing the artwork’s actual size and details up close is something students don’t get in the classroom where they can only see reproductions, he said.

“But when you see the texture that you can only see in person, it adds another layer to their education,” Moss said.

The Deary students’ favorite photographs in the exhibit ranged from the iconic “Kissing the War Goodbye” photo to an image of the Wright Brothers’ first flight.

 Fifth-grader Emily Suswal said she likes the program because she enjoys seeing and learning about art.  Although she doesn’t visit art shows or museums at home, she sees art up close twice a year at WSU during class field trips.

“We’re going to continue to grow it as long as we can,” Shannon said. “We’re not Seattle by any means, or even Spokane, but we’re a center for learning and culture.”

The Murrow News Service provides local, regional and statewide stories reported and written by journalism students at The Edward R. Murrow College of Communication at Washington State University.