A lost art: amid student-achievement pressure, Colorado falls to 47th in arts-education funding.

• Author: Peterson, Eric

Grinning and kicking as he plays air guitar, 11-year-old O'Brien Ramirez looks like he's having a heck of a time.

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Onstage with about 30 other students, Ramirez is rehearsing a scene in "A Cloudy Situation," a pro-diversity, anti-bullying play that debuted last month at Clayton Elementary School in Englewood. He's a natural actor, delivering his lines both perfectly and with perfect timing.

Deftly directing the fidgety but focused group is Michelle Grimes, a fourth-grade teacher at Clayton. She says Ramirez's demeanor is the polar opposite of what it was before he got into acting. Coming from a non-English-speaking household, "He sat in my classroom for six months and said five words," she says. "He was shy and insecure. Now he's dynamic. He's confident. He's outgoing."

He came out of his shell after trying out for a primary speaking role in another of Grimes' plays last year and memorized his lines to a tee, on his own.

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"He's a natural," Grimes says. "He had that secret inside."

O'Brien himself says he "just went for it" in his first audition and that he wants to keep acting ... well, at least maybe. Then he grins. Memorizing lines "helps me remember things for other classes," he adds.

O'Brien found that hidden artistic gift inside himself, thanks in part to a healthy dose of arts and arts-integrated classes at Clayton. Alongside him onstage is Khadija Williams, who started playing the cello two years ago, likewise, thanks to an arts program at Clayton. She soon discovered her instrumental prowess exceeded her ability to write a book report.

But O'Brien and Khadija might just be all-too-rare exceptions to the rule in Colorado.

Funding for arts education has skidded downhill since the advent of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001, and observers say the result is a vicious circle. Ill-equipped students enter the workforce as ill-equipped workers, a community's arts-and-culture foundation suffers in tandem, begetting a corresponding dip in quality of life, which naturally makes it harder to recruit workers to said city or state or neighborhood, which in turn makes it hard to reverse the arts from atrophying more.

As the logic of the entire circuit implies, the locally educated workforce by and large is not getting the job done by itself--which has major long-term implications for Colorado's economy if the educational battleship isn't righted. And if getting the arts back into the curriculum is a big part of a turnaround--as many critics argue--increased corporate philanthropy might be the only means of building the necessary bridges between the state's continuously improving arts infrastructure and its future workforce.

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"The business community has been on a rampage about the decline in quality of the workforce," says Angela Norlander, executive director of Think 360 Arts Complete Education, a Denver-based nonprofit. "The arts are included in No Child Left Behind. People have this assumption that they aren't, but that's not true. However, when kids are tested, it's not actually included."

In Denver Public Schools, arts-oriented after-school programs were cut back in 2005 to devote more funding to "CSAP boot camps," Norlander says, referring to the Colorado Student Assessment Program, which aims to measure student achievement. "They're electing to utilize those funds for other purposes (than the arts)."

No matter how insulated the business community might feel from this arts crunch in our local schools, that just...