Nick Nice
Children paint watercolors in the room built in 1939 specifically for art.
Sally Behr taught art at Lapham Elementary School for 16 years, guiding thousands of young students through their very first art projects in a corner room on the second floor — a space designed specifically for art education when the school was built in 1939.
“It is probably the best elementary art room in the school district,” says Behr, who retired from teaching in 2013. “When they were building a new school, administrators would look at the way this art room was laid out to copy different aspects of it. It was kind of a perfect art room.”
School is back in session this week. But Lapham students will not be creating art on the second floor, due to a decision by principal Tammy Thompson Kapp to move the art room to the lower level of the school. Upset parents started an online petition, which has netted 125 signatures, to keep the art room in its original location.
David Tooley, a parent of a second-grader at Lapham, led an unsuccessful effort to lobby Thompson Kapp to change her mind about relocating the art room.
“It has a kiln. It has a big storage room for all the materials. It has cubbyholes for kids. It has a lot of natural light. It’s a special room for a lot of people,” says Tooley. “It’s one of the reasons why we were excited to send our daughter to Lapham.”
Tooley says the new art room is not as well lit and lacks similar amenities.
“It’s also a symbolic move,” Tooley says. “Art is moving to the basement when it used to have a prominent place in the building.”
Thompson Kapp says although enrollment remains steady at Lapham, class sizes are growing because of fewer classroom sections. She says she had to find a way to reduce class size for math and literacy instruction. That meant moving art to the lower level so the art room could be used as flexible learning space.
“The room on the second floor is a beautiful space for art,” Thompson Kapp admits. But she says keeping it exclusively for art doesn’t meet the school’s needs this year. Thompson Kapp says if conditions change next year, she will consider returning art to the second floor.
“In the meantime, we already know that there are going to be some units — like clay — where it just makes more sense for students to work up in that space near the kiln, where there are other supplies,” says Thompson Kapp. “So we will be flexible in our thinking and scheduling to make that happen so kids still have access to that space. It’s just going to look different than it’s looked in the past.”
