(Editor's note: Since this story was printed in 1999, the funding for UC Davis ArtsBridge has undergone a dramatic reduction in concert with cuts to higher education in the state budget. UC Davis students can now get course credits as interns in the program.)

Dixon third graders are making marionettes. Sacramento fifth graders are creating a theater production, and high school students are learning printmaking. Their teachers? UC Davis arts students participating in a new outreach program begun this fall.

Known as UC Davis ArtsBridge, the program offers children in 20 classrooms in Dixon, Woodland, Winters and Sacramento the chance to learn about the arts from 22 UC Davis arts student-scholars. Davis is implementing the program this fall; UC Irvine pioneered the program four years ago, and it became available throughout the UC system last spring.

ArtsBridge encompasses both visual and performing arts, though in its first year at UC Davis focuses primarily on visual art. The mission of ArtsBridge is to provide arts education in K-12 public schools in California that typically have limited or no formal art curriculum. Often the college students and classroom teachers who participate in the program grew up with no formal arts education offered in their California public elementary schools.

"We're trying to reintegrate the arts into schools, getting across the idea that the arts are a vehicle for learning, not just a 'fun' side event. Art is a useful, hands-on process to help the child grow and understand themselves and the world at more than just the linear cognitive level," says Cornelia Schulz, art professor and director of UC Davis ArtsBridge.

Local, generally underperforming schools in Sacramento, Dixon, Winters and Woodland received applications to request a UC Davis student arts "scholar" for their classes. Graduate and undergraduate students apply to teach in the program, and those selected spend at least eight weeks teaching an arts-related topic, receiving a $1,000 scholarship for their efforts.

The student scholars are counseled by UC Davis ArtsBridge program mentors, who have had experience in K-12 teaching. ArtsBridge is supported through funds allocated to UC by the state legislature; each campus applies annually for part of that money. For the 1999-2000 academic year, UC Davis received $160,000. The program is a win-win for both the student scholars and for the participating schools.

"I say to the scholars 'you have a mission' to assist in correcting the unfortunate dilemma of diminishing funds to the arts in K-12. This project tries to help bring the arts back into the classroom," Schulz says.

"When I go to the schools to promote the program, I say that art is another vehicle for teaching your subject, another vehicle for learning. And the teachers know that their children learn in different ways. I might say 'think of bringing in a theater scholar to help the class act out a history lesson.'"

Projects currently under way include: o marionette-making and a theatrical production using the puppets in a third-grade classroom in Dixon; o a collaborative effort among several Sacramento elementary classrooms to produce a theatrical production, complete with a student-created backdrop and dance steps; o drawing and sculpture-making in a second-grade classroom in Woodland; or an introduction to music and to songs about California's history in a fourth-grade classroom in Dixon; o drawing and ceramics, including making a mural that incorporates California history, in a fourth-grade classroom in Woodland; and o learning about color and drawing in a first-grade classroom in Dixon.