Philanthropist tries to raise awareness for art

You've got your CRT, your ITBS, your AYP — all the standardized ways of measuring a school's success. Here's another: a room full of first-graders excited by the gooey prospect of combining shaving cream and food coloring.

One morning last week, as even the boys oohed and aahed and rolled up their sleeves to make what the art specialist called "organic lines" of color, a grandmotherly woman in a pink suit pulled up a chair to watch.

Beverley Sorenson is 85 now but has not slowed down in her 15-year campaign to bring arts education to every elementary school in Utah. A few hours after observing the first-graders at Monroe Elementary in West Valley City, she boarded a plane for Cedar City to meet with school principals. This week she will launch a 23-town blitz to rally parents and educators.

Sorenson is hoping to create a groundswell of support that will convince the Utah Legislature to restore funding that was cut last spring from the Beverley Taylor Sorenson Arts Learning Program.

Ask her why Utahns should care about elementary school arts education — why the Legislature should spend money on dance and music and theater and visual arts for kids when budgets are tight — and she'll look at you as if you'd asked why people should refrain from killing each other.

"Because it is good and it is right," she answers.

Sorenson is the widow of James L. Sorenson, who was Utah's richest man when he died in 2008, a multibillionaire medical inventor, businessman and philanthropist. They met when she was teaching kindergarten at a Quaker School in Brooklyn in 1945, after graduating in elementary education from the University of Utah.

After they married, she says, she gave up teaching to "start our own kindergarten." Sorenson herself grew up in Sugar House, in a family where there was always music. Her older sister Helen studied at Julliard and played the piano for dance innovator Martha Graham, and Sorenson herself took piano and dance lessons. She made sure her own eight children were exposed to the arts.

But over the years, Sorenson watched in dismay as arts instruction was gradually eliminated from Utah public schools. And then, in the mid-1990s, she had an epiphany while on a tour of Salt Lake's Lincoln Elementary.

Lincoln has the kind of demographics that earn the label "at risk," but its halls were lined with the students' artwork — not just construction paper pumpkins that all look the same but "originals," each of them framed. Led by a dynamic principal, Sherianne Cotterell, Lincoln had a partnership with Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, and a visual artist -in-residence who helped the students create a 2,000-pound bronze sculpture.