A team of students from the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service has spent the academic year researching the impacts of Thea Foundation’s Art Closet program in the Little Rock and North Little Rock School Districts.
Thea’s Art Closet funds creative material and supplies requests from public school educators across Arkansas, making the arts accessible for students in high-poverty areas and to classrooms with minimal budgets. Since its inception, Thea’s Art Closet has donated more than $1.5 million in supplies to hundreds of schools across the state. During the 2019-20 school year alone, the program has donated more than $95,000 of resources.
“Clinton School students are very action-oriented, and we love that,” said Jennifer Owens Buie, Thea Foundation’s Director of Development and supervisor of the Clinton School team. “Working for a statewide nonprofit, you have to be action-oriented.”
Working with Owens Buie, first-year students Lydia Grate (Russellville, Ark.), Connor Thompson (Little Rock, Ark.), and Alec Zills (Gleason, Tenn.) interviewed teachers, school administrators, other stakeholders in the education system connected to Thea’s Art Closet.
“We gave the team a list of teachers who had benefited from the Art Closet program and the team took that initiative and ran with it,” Owens Buie said. “They conducted interviews by email, over the phone, and in person. They took the original idea and they just really saw it through to completion.”
The team’s research questions addressed the benefits of a robust arts curriculum, the perceived need for arts programming among stakeholders in local school districts, the impacts of Thea’s Art Closet on its student recipients, and how those impacts can be communicated to decision-makers and stakeholders for further investment in the arts.
Owens Buie said that a few of the team’s early findings grabbed her attention. One research item showed that more than half of the interviewed teachers annually spend between $100 and $500 of their own money to purchase classroom supplies.
“We knew going into this that teachers are underfunded, and we knew teachers sometimes pay for their own supplies,” Owens Buie said. “But we did not realize it was that many, and to that amount, every year. It shows us that what we are doing is needed, and it’s needed now more than ever.”
The team will present its findings online on Friday, April 24.
“This research is not only going to help us with donors and fundraising, it’s also going to help us in the political realm,” Owens Buie said. “We are advocating for higher levels of education and funding to schools and teachers.”
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