Arts organizations respond to Oregon’s public schools budget crisis • Oregon ArtsWatch
A small, but growing number of Oregon nonprofit arts organizations are helping to address the state’s increasing public schools finding crisis. They are beginning to offer arts classes on Fridays in mostly rural school districts who have cut back to teaching just four days a week to save money.
The initiative is called 5th for the Arts. It grew out of a previous project to improve arts education funded by the Oregon Community Foundation. The work could especially help the approximately 100 districts in the state where some, if not all, schools are only offering classes Monday through Thursday, primarily because of funding restrictions.
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The current effort is being spread by the Oregon Arts Education Collective, a coalition of artists, arts teachers, and nonprofit arts organizations which meet regularly to exchange ideas and inspire one another to help address multiple shortcomings in public arts education. That idea is being discussed and promoted by the collective’s Rural Arts Working Group, which is led by Ariadne Grace (née Gina Angelique), the artistic director of The Motherline in Cave Junction in Southern Oregon.
The Motherline’s mission is to center culture, relationship, and creativity as drivers of long-term community wellbeing through a variety of activities, including the arts. It has been offering dance classes every Friday in the Three Rivers School District in Josephine County for several years.
“We are combining ecology, the environment, agriculture, and art to create sustainable communities. Grounding. We are attracting at least 35 students every Friday who want to do more art than is available in the public schools, and that’s very exciting,” Grace told Oregon ArtsWatch.
As part of her work with the collective, Grace compiled a list of approximately 100 school districts in Oregon with four-day teaching weeks. Each school day is longer than those in five-day districts in order to meet the state’s minimum teaching requirements, which vary from 900 to 966 hours a school year, depending on grade level. Some have done it for decades, others are more recent (see list below).
“There is not a comprehensive list anywhere on the web that I could find. So, I literally researched district by district. Then, we had an intern from the University of Oregon, Alice Glab, confirm my findings,” Grace said.
Joining The Motherline this year is Arts in Education of the Gorge, a longtime nonprofit organization based in Hood River that seeks to enhance K-12 education through the performing, visual, literary, and media arts. It has long placed teaching artists in schools in six counties along both the Oregon and Washington sides of the Columbia River.
“We were created 40 years ago by parents who wanted more arts education in the schools, and are now the only organization in the Columbia River Gorge with a roster of teaching artists who have been going into the schools,” Executive Director Amy Gray told Oregon Arts Watch.
This September, Gray’s organization also began offering day-long Friday classes at the Mosier Community School when its board of directors cut back to teaching four days a week for the first time. She got the idea from Grace through the Oregon Arts Education Collective’s Rural Arts Working Group.
According to Gray, the new Friday classes range from ceramics to watercolors, to music, movement, and more. Attendance has grown every week, beginning with 60 students and increasing to 88 before dropping back to 69 – a good response out of a total enrollment of 205.
“Offering classes on longer days four times a week is more efficient for the school. And it creates the opportunity for us on Fridays,” Gray said.
After learning about the programs in Southern Oregon and Mosier through the Rural Working Group, musician Amy Fairchild was inspired to take a different approach. She and her children live in Wallowa County in Eastern Oregon, where all of the schools have been on four-day weeks for many years. After conducting an extensive survey of opportunities and existing activities, Fairchild discovered that seven organizations in the county were already offering arts-related classes and activities, including on Fridays, but some of them were not widely known.
That prompted Fairchild to produce an online calendar so that more residents could learn about and take advantage of them. It includes the activities offered by the Wallowa Valley Music Alliance; Fishtrap, Writing and the West; the Josephy Center for Arts and Culture; the Wallowa County Dance Academy; Building Healthy Families; Wallowa Resources; and the Southfork Grange & Community Orchard.
“We’re pretty lucky to already have so many opportunities in such a remote location,” said Fairchild, who herself teaches musical theater classes on Fridays.
Shortage of arts education a longtime problem
In theory, providing arts education in Oregon public schools should not even be a question. State law (ORS 329.045) requires it. The Oregon State Board of Education formally adopted Content Standards for The Arts in 2015. The five disciplines are Dance, Media Arts, Music, Theatre, and Visual Arts.
But in fact, while the law requires that arts be taught, it does not guarantee that every school has even a single dedicated, full-time art or music teacher, especially at the elementary level. Data from Americans for the Arts documents the gap between the legal mandate and what is actually happening in state schools.
According to the most recent report by Americans for the Arts, a national arts advocacy organization, approximately 27% of elementary schools in Oregon do not offer stand-alone arts courses. That compares to 98% of middle schools and 86% of high schools.
The differences are especially severe between smaller rural and larger urban school districts, however. According to the most recent data from the Oregon Department of Education’s Well Rounded Access Program and statewide assessments, 45% of elementary students in rural communities attend a school without a stand-alone course in the arts. That compares to 10% of elementary students in suburban locales and 20% of students in urban locales. At the middle school level, 13% of students attend a school without a stand-alone arts course in rural communities, compared to less than 2.5% in suburban and urban locales.
“Some rural school districts have a history of offering excellent arts classes, but there is no doubt there are fewer of them than in urban districts. Rural districts have fewer resources and even fewer artists living in them. There are more art organizations available to support the schools in urban districts,” Jerry Tischleder, Senior Program Officer of Arts and Culture with the Oregon Community Foundation told Oregon Arts Watch. The statewide non-profit philanthropic organization manages charitable funds to support community causes, nonprofits, and student scholarships across the state.
Although long aware of the issue, the Oregon Community Foundation received a $150 million bequest to begin seriously addressing it in 2012. The funding came from the estate of Fred W. Fields, an Oregon lumber industrialist, on the condition that the funds be spent on arts and education.
“Fred’s humble roots shaped his life. He was never extravagant, though he had the means to be. He instead wanted to use his wealth to support causes that he and his wife, Sue, felt strongly about. His bequest will continue this legacy of generosity, and we will be a better state for it,” Fields estate trustee Bill Tagmyer said at the time.
Since then, The Fred W. Fields Fund, established in partnership with Oregon Humanities, has distributed millions of dollars to hundreds of arts organizations, cultural institutions, and educational programs throughout the state.
One of the projects was called Studio to School, which invested $6 million in 18 organizations to support a robust arts learning community. It brought together arts organizations and schools or school districts to expand and improve arts education programming for K-12 students. The core goal was to figure out how to design, implement, and permanently sustain high-quality arts learning that reaches underserved students.
According to OCF, through the Studio to School projects, an estimated 22,000 Oregon students participated in arts education over five years. Many were students of color, students from low-income households, and students from under-resourced rural communities.
The evaluation demonstrated many positive outcomes, including:
- Students gained artistic skills and knowledge and saw themselves as artists, musicians, and creatives. They built vital cognitive, social, and emotional skills, explored identities and expanded their interests. They felt a sense of engagement and belonging within schools and communities and made their voices heard on issues they care about.
- Teachers improved their teaching practices and gained new skills and knowledge, capacity, confidence, and creativity.
- Families and community members connected to schools and shared a sense of pride, celebration, and belonging.
- Schools embraced the arts as a part of school identity.
“Through the Initiative, we witnessed incredible change and growth in the people, organizations, schools, and communities engaged in the Studio to School projects. We also learned together, discovering that many challenges, successes, and lessons were shared across the projects, despite their great diversity,” the evaluation concluded.
Three initiatives across Oregon
One of the Studio to School recipients was RiverStars Performing Arts, an after-school youth theater and dance program started under the umbrella of the Illinois Valley Community Development Organization in Southern Oregon. Originally located at the Lorna Byrne Middle School, which is part of the Three River School District in Cave Junction, it served an average of 80 students and their parents until the arrival of Covid-19 in early 2020, when the district went to a four-day school week. Because each day was longer, there was no longer time for after-school activities.
RiverStars’ leadership included Ariadne Grace, who had started and operated a successful dance studio in San Diego before moving to Southern Oregon 20 years ago. Unwilling to lose the program, they created a full day of classes to take place on Fridays called the RiverStars Family Engagement Program, giving both students and homeschoolers an option for filling their “5th” school day with meaningful arts education.
“We had tons of interaction with the school district, but Covid changed everything,” Grace said.
The program shifted locations to other sites in Cave Junction over the years, including a city park and health center, before finally landing at the Takilma Community Building, situated in an unincorporated community in the woods about nine miles out of town. The multi-purpose gathering center and event space offered enough room for 40-plus students. There, the program reestablished itself as The Motherline, with fiscal sponsorship from the Cave Junction Farmers Market, before being approved by the IRS as a 501c3 nonprofit organization and public charity in October 2025.
Other programs currently offered by the Motherline include: Cultivate Kids, which teaches sustainable agriculture to young people; Mentorweb, which brings together braids of kids, teens, and adults for monthly supportive activities; and even two forest cleanup programs, Clean Sweep and Tire Day.
Major funders include the Oregon Arts Commission, the Oregon Community Foundation, the Roundhouse Foundation, the Cow Creek Foundation, and the Miller Foundation. Other support is being actively pursued.
As the Studio to School program began winding down, many of the participants agreed to keep meeting regularly to continue the work. They formed the Oregon Arts Education Collective, which the Oregon Community Foundation agreed to continue to help fund. That allowed Gray to learn from Grace about offering 5th for Arts classes at the Mosier Community School this September.
“Artists, teachers, arts organizations, and others came together to see what they could do to strengthen arts education in Oregon. It’s a beautiful opportunity for collaborative partnerships. A lot of school districts are in a ‘we have to cut’ mindset, but groups are now coming forward and offering them more choices,” said Aimee Craig, the collective’s co-lead facilitator.
Their other current initiatives include writing a manifesto and playbook for advocating for arts in the schools, determining what resources teaching artists need, intergenerational arts instruction, and pursuing restorative and traditional practices.
Arts in Education in the Gorge has a roster of more than 30 teaching artists and reaches over 7,500 students a year. It is active in schools in Hood River, Wasco, Sherman, and Gilliam counties in Oregon, and Klickitat and Skamania counties in Washington. Through in-school art residencies, after-school arts partnerships and community arts activities, it engages K-12 students in the creative process through performing, literary, visual, and media arts. But the organization has never offered a day of Friday classes until now in Mosier.
Unlike most other schools offering classes four days a week, the change at the Mosier Community School was not made to save money. It is a charter school with its own board within the North Wasco County School District that serves students from as far away as The Dalles, which is approximately 16 miles to the east. When offering classes five days a week, school days ran from 7:30 a.m. to 2:15 p.m. Asking families to have their students catch a bus at 6:15 a.m. increased absenteeism and tardiness for students. Switching to four days a week allowed the school to adjust its hours to a more reasonable 8:20 a.m. to 3:50 p.m.
“Parents are very excited about the four-day week. We went from an average of 70% attendance for the 2025-26 school year to an average of 90% attendance for our first two months of the 2026-27 school year,” Principal Michelle Dawkins told Oregon ArtsWatch.
When the board began considering the change last year, Grant began talking to Dawkins about Arts in Education of the Gorge offering classes in the school on Fridays. Dawkins was immediately supportive. She went to work at the Mosier Community School from the Corbett School District, which has been on a four-day schedule since 1998, but does not offer any options for families on Fridays.
“We love working with Arts in Education in the Gorge. They’re fabulous. The kids are very excited about the artwork,” said Dawkins, who said the classes are part of the school’s FLEX (Flexible Learning Enrichment eXperiences) Fridays, which includes field trips offered by the nonprofit Let’s Get Out outdoors organization, and activities by local groups like the Columbia Gorge Humane Society.
The Friday classes are offered from 8:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. Unlike the situation in Cave Junction, the Mosier Community School is funding classes by contracting with Arts in Education in the Gorge to administer them. Lunch is provided by the cafeteria staff and extra student support is provided by the educational assistants of Mosier Community School. This year’s cost is about $88,000, with some of the funding coming from the Columbia Gorge Foundation. Dawkins is also pursuing funding from other grant sources and reaching out to local businesses for sponsorships.
“The great thing about scheduling activities on Fridays is that organizations can tailor them to their circumstances. It’s not one size fits all,” said Craig.
The lead teaching artist of the Mosier Community School classes is Jordan Kim, who specializes in mixed media collages. She is very pleased with the response to the program, and believes attendance will continue to increase again before the end of the school year.
“Principal Dawkins did a good job informing parents that it was coming, but word of mouth is much more effective,” Kim told Oregon ArtsWatch.
Like Gray, Kim is quick to credit Grace with spreading the 5th for Arts idea through the Oregon Arts Education Collective. She believes other arts organizations throughout the state can find success with the concept, too.
The Oregon Arts Education Collective supported the creation of the Wallowa County Google calendar. After creating it this year, Amy Fairchild plans to meet again with teachers, school officials, artists, and nonprofit arts administrators next year to identify any gaps where new programs might be started.
“I joined the Oregon Arts Education Collective the previous summer and learned about what is happening in Southern Oregon and Mosier, which looks totally different than what is happening in Wallowa County. But it’s all exciting,” Fairchild said.
Jerry Tischleder with the Oregon Community Foundation is also pleased with the results so far.
“I’m very excited about the 5th for Arts idea. This is the kind of example that can make a big difference in rural school districts,” Tischleder said.
School districts in Oregon with four-day weeks for at least some schools (Source: Ariadne Grace)
Region 1: Alsea SD.Colton SD. Estacada SD, Central Linn SD, Harrisburg SD, Santiam County SD, Sweet Home SD, Falls City SD, Perrydale SD, Nestucca Valley SD, Jewell SD, Clatskanie SD, Rainier SD, Corbett SD, Amity SD, Sheridan SD
Region 2: Reedsport SD, Winston Dillard SD, Butte Falls SD, Pinehurst SD, Adel SD, Lakeview SD, North Lake SD, Paisley SD, Plush SD, Blachly SD, Crow Applegate Lorane SD, Camas Valley SD, Duglas County 4 SD, Douglas County 15 SD, Elkton SD, Glendale SD, Glide SD, Oakland SD, Ashwood SD, Three Rivers SD, Lowell SD, Mapleton SD, McKenzie SD, Oakridge SD
Region 3: Baker SD, Burnt River SD, Huntington SD, Pine Eagle SD, Dayville SD, John Day SD, Long Creek SD, Monument SD, Prairie City SD, Harney Co 3 SD, Harney Co 4 SD, Diamond SD, Double O SD, Drewsey SD, Frenchglen SD, Harney Co Union High SD, Pine Creek SD, South Harney SD 33, Suntex SD, Adrian SD, Suntex SD, Harper SD, Jordan Valley SD, Juntura SD, Nyssa SD, Ontario SD, Vale SD, Ione SD, Sherman SD, Athena Weston SD, Echo SD, Helix SD, Pilot Rock SD, Stanfield SD, Ukiah SD, Cove SD, Elgin SD, Imbler SD, LaGrande SD, North Powder SD, Union SD, Enterprise SD, Joseph SD, Troy SD, Wallowa SD
