Walk the hallways of Canyon Rim's Highland Park Elementary, and you'll find evidence of Beverley Taylor Sorenson's influence everywhere, on bulletin boards and festooning classroom walls. Many schools are decorated with students' artwork, but in other schools, most are made in art class. Here, the decorative projects include delicate autumn leaves made during science class and intricate relief maps made while studying geography.

Through her philanthropic foundation and personal donations, Sorenson has been supporting arts education in a number of Utah schools, such as Highland, for more than a dozen years. "My little children are at risk," Sorenson recalls thinking when she discovered the steady decrease of arts-education funding in her home state.

In 1995, she founded the nonprofit Art Works for Kids!, through which she has donated more than $20 million of her own money to K-6 Utah schools.

During last year's legislative session, Sorenson worked to secure state funding for elementary arts specialists. Along the way, the arts patron found herself part of a coalition of educators and arts and government agencies.

That a single individual -- and a private citizen, at that -- was subsidizing elementary arts education for the entire state seemed, well "unfair," is how Margaret Hunt, executive director of the Utah Arts Council describes it. "We had to find a way to bring everyone into the project."

Last year, Utah lawmakers budgeted nearly $16 million to create a four-year pilot program. Based on the theories of educational researchers, Hunt and Sorenson are betting the program will prove a significant correlation between arts training and students' cognitive and personal development.

Beginning this fall, through the Beverly Taylor Sorenson Arts Learning Program, 59 dance, theater, art and music teachers hit the ground running in 49 Utah elementary schools.

The state funding provides schools with the salary to add a new position, as well as funds for equipment and materials. In addition, it pays the salaries of coordinators at four Utah universities.

The mission of the Sorenson program is to integrate arts education into school curriculum, and in turn, also teach core subjects in the arts classroom.

Schools in the program are classified as beginning, emerging and established arts schools, according to program coordinator Janet Wolf. Highland Park Elementary is an established school, in large part because of Sorenson's prior generosity (there is already a music specialist in place for several years) and, in part, because of the school's historical commitment to the arts.

Teachers at Highland Park "have to love the arts," says principal Sue Parker. She hires teachers who already are trained to integrate visual art, dance, music, and theater in teaching core subjects, and already know that what happens in the art room or music class can solidify science or math lessons.

For example, children sing songs about terrain when learning about geography, and in art class, students make bound journals before they write entries in them.

Highland Park's new art specialist Kathleen Bonafay meets with classroom teachers to discuss lesson plans and to suggest artistic endeavors they might incorporate. In return, classroom teachers visit Bonafay's classroom and make art along with their students.

Not all the specialists in the Sorenson program have joined established arts schools, like Highland Park. At Davis County's Muir Elementary, a "beginning school," dance teacher Tina Masaka is helping to develop arts training, and the first months have been uphill, Hunt says.

In the next few weeks, Masaka will help her students stage their first "informance" -- that's in contrast to a performance -- an event intended to educate and involve parents and the community in the arts learning program.

What sets apart the pilot program is that arts specialists aren't left alone. They've got the support of an entire infrastructure, dubbed the Utah Arts Education Project, through a marriage of four agencies -- Sorenson's original nonprofit, the Utah Arts Council, the Utah PTA and the Utah State Office of Education.

Arts specialists meet regularly with trained mentors.

At each of four universities, mentors receive their training from "principal investigators."

From the top down, chaired "Sorenson professors" work to train all education students to incorporate arts into their lesson plans.

Financially, money from the state budget is distributed through the state Office of Education to the state Arts council.

Wolf keeps an eye on the program on a day-to-day basis, and will coordinate mid- and end-of-year assessments with another agency, the University of Utah Center for Education Policy and Research. Finally, the whole program will be capped with a report card at the end of the four-year pilot.

Sue Parker, principal of Highland Park, says she already knows the Sorenson Learning Program works. She loves to take visitors on tours of her school.

It's evident every time she opens the door of Bonifay's art classroom and visitors can see the art teacher dressed from neck to knee in a red apron, moving easily between children, responding gently and thoughtfully to sketch and writing books.

Down the hall, the principal opens the door of Jennifer Purdy's music classroom and lets the sound of third graders singing waft out into the hallway.

But perhaps Parker's favorite thing to do is talk about the ways art has transformed the lives of her students, and how she believes all the individual anecdotes will be captured in the final assessment report.

"We're developing the proper instruments to show how this kind of program works," says Wolfs, the program's director, who points to research that supports such learning plans.

The whole program is based around measuring what works. But Wolf and Hunt believe that the arts training isn't just about statistics or new research. In the end, they believe, it's about Sorenson returning to Utah schoolchildren immeasurable joy.

jcheckoway@sltrib.com