ART-FELT GENEROSITY

A program for cash-strapped schools in the region, feeling the pinch of statewide budget cuts, is helping ease the financial burden by providing art supplies for a number of classrooms.

The Paints 4 Peace program, organized by the Human Rights Education Institute in Coeur d’Alene, is offering to the first 25 schools that call in and sign up a selection of art supplies – either 240 tubes of watercolor paint, 6.5 gallons of acrylic paint, or 6 gallons of tempera paint, along with the appropriate brushes. That’s enough paint to carry most art classes through the school year, said Rachel Dolezal, curator and director of education at the institute.

“The Paints 4 Peace program really was a response to the school budget cuts,” said Dolezal, who also holds a master of fine arts degree and is a part-time art instructor at North Idaho College. “When we heard there was zero dollars for art supplies for the coming year, we really felt like that sort of threatened the freedom of expression and some of the opportunities that kids have … to really express original thought.”

As part of the program, the schools will participate in a peace-themed art exhibit, where teachers select a local, national or global topic and have students express what that peace-related issue means to them. The pieces will go on display in October in an evening event dubbed Peace Walk, where the community is invited to tour the schools.

“The teachers are going to work on peace-themed art with these paints and hang that work on National Children’s Day, Oct. 14, in the hallways. It is kind of like Art Walk downtown; we’ll have a map that shows where people can go for Peace Walk,” Dolezal said. “It’s really in the hands of the art teacher and the students to interpret what peace means to them; we’re not dictating a certain curriculum to go with it.”

In focusing on the overall subject of peace, she added: “There’s a lot of polarization in our nation right now. In the last couple years, there’s been an increase in the number of hate crimes, the number of biased incidents – there’s just a lot of agitation. So perhaps some schools will focus on national issues or international issues; we are leaving it open to the teacher and students to decide.”

By distributing the materials to schools, the paints program also takes some of the financial pressure off parents, who already provide a lengthy list of other school supplies, Dolezal explained. The high-quality materials, purchased from an online supply company, “are really a step above what the standard margin would be for art supplies in the K-12 schools,” she added.

“Some parents just can’t afford to pay for all those items, and to add to that would really put the burden on parents. In this tough economic time, we just felt there was a need to take some of that burden off the parents and, ultimately, off the schools,” Dolezal said. “Zero dollars for art supplies just can’t happen – it’s not okay.”

So far, teachers from a range of schools around North Idaho have called in to get on the list.

Fernan Elementary art teacher Christine Owens said the program comes at a troubling time. In the past, the school budgeted roughly $2 per student for art supplies, with several hundred students passing through her classroom each week. Now, though, budgets have been slashed throughout the district, so Owens called as soon as she heard about the program.

“I have no budget for supplies this year, and that means zero dollars for consumables, and that’s what we use,” Owens said. “It’s hard – it’s hard for the entire district right now. We’re really happy they are doing this. With this program, we can get the watercolors for the entire year.”

Owens said she believes her students will enjoy taking part in the peace project. “They love to paint, and the project, I think, will be really fun for them, too,” she added. “The students are so in touch with what’s going on in the world and this will allow them to show how they feel about it. I think they’ll have a blast.”

The institute’s Dolezal hopes Paints 4 Peace is enough to fend off even more drastic cuts to the arts, at least for the upcoming school year.

“The arts are a primary means of accessing identity themes and personal expression,” she said. “I’m looking forward to seeing what they paint.”

The paints program overlaps with the launch of the Human Rights Education Institute’s latest six-month program, Pause 4 Peace, a timeline mural, marking significant moments of peace over the last 160 years, that wraps around the interior of the institute at 414 1/2 Mullan Ave. The peace-themed exhibit is also the last in the two-year program “Fast Forward: Globalization and Human Rights.”