With 1.7 million public school students spread throughout 4,061 square miles in 81 school districts, Los Angeles County is daunting in geography, demographics, and size. To enact arts education reform across one school district is difficult. To enact arts education reform across 81 is Herculean.

Yet that is precisely what Arts for All: LA County Regional Blueprint for Arts Education is doing. It is a strategic plan restoring rigorous, sequential K-12 arts education to every public school student in the County. Its primary strategy is building infrastructure at the school district level: a Board-approved arts education policy and plan, district-wide Arts Coordinator, 5% of general fund dollars for the arts, and a student to credentialed art teacher ratio of no more than 400:1.

Seven years have passed since the initiative's launch. Each year deepens our learning about how to best achieve the goals of the Blueprint. The recently released Arts for All: The Vanguard Districts - Case Studies from the First Five Years grew out of a need for us to take a step back and learn from what was happening within our school districts. Up until that point the initiative was driven by a set of assumptions, including that supporting school districts to engage in community-wide planning for arts education is the key to restoring it to all children, and that building arts education infrastructure is the key to sustaining it through difficult economic circumstances.

The report reveals the strengths and weaknesses of those assumptions. It illustrates that while arts education infrastructure is indeed fundamental, support for school districts cannot end with the close of the planning process. The report also emphasizes that the planning process, and the written, Board-adopted policies and plans that result, is critical - more so than we originally anticipated. The higher the quality of the arts education plan, the more progress made on the ground, and vice versa.

As of this writing, Arts for All is in active partnership with 39 of the 81 school districts in the County. Facing draconian budget cuts, not a single Arts for All school district retreated from its arts education plans. Most committed to maintaining their programs. Some looked the recession square in the eye and chose to take their efforts a step further.

Such success has affirmed many of our strategies. The results of the report has prompted us to rethink others, and led us toward developing new programs. Earlier this year we launched a Leadership Fellows Program for Superintendents and Assistant Superintendents to deepen their understanding of quality arts learning and their roles in moving it forward. We are also offering professional development opportunities for Arts Coordinators, providing community advocacy training, and creating indicators to define and measure quality, access, and equity of arts education in schools. In the coming months we will continue to refine and expand the planning services we offer new Arts for All school districts.

We didn't anticipate any of these strategies when the Blueprint was adopted seven years ago. When these new efforts are assessed, the results will likely lead us in directions that we can't imagine today. Arts for All: The Vanguard Districts - Case Studies from the First Five Years emphasizes the incredibly dynamic nature of this work. It documents sustained, long-term, and large-scale strategies that expand, shift and adjust, all to make quality arts education present in the lives of the 1.7 million students living within Los Angeles County.

-Ayanna Hudson, Director of Arts Education, Arts for All, and Talia Gibas, Arts Education Coordinator, Arts for All, Los Angeles County Arts Commission