Interview with Kevin O’Brien, principal at Grant Elementary School

By Mark McKenna

Kevin O’Brien: This is Kevin O’Brien, and I am principal of Grant Elementary School, one of eight elementary schools in Eureka County Schools.

Mark McKenna: Tell me about arts in the schools and how they effect your community right now.

KOB: The arts are certainly a crucial element in our curriculum. There are times when you have to fight battles over keeping the arts, because people will get to a point of saying school is about reading, writing and arithmetic. Yet it is the arts that help us greatly in the human interest side of things. My own perception of education is that we have a lot to educate students with besides academics. Every day provides opportunities for kids to learn social and emotional skills. The arts are really a way of learning to express those things, especially the emotional skills.

MM: How long have you been at this school?

KOB: This is my third year at Grant. I was at Lincoln Elementary School for three years before that. It is a different part of town and a totally different population.

MM: Can you describe your population right now?

KOB: Currently? This is a middle-class environment. Not a lot of diversity in this school. The majority of the people are two-parent households, fairly stable in terms of mobility, where my previous school had a very high mobility rate. Many of the parents went to school in Eureka City Schools. Many of them went to Grant. So, the population is considerably more stable here.

MM: I know that Dell’Arte was recently at the high school and all the feeder schools got to come in. What did you know about Dell’Arte before that, and what was your impulse to ask them to come in?

KOB: Well, I’ve been a fan of Dell’Arte for many years. In my college and post-college years I lived in Blue Lake and was very aware of Dell’Arte. I have enjoyed their performances over the years. I knew quite a bit about Dell’Arte. What I really enjoyed about what happened this year – I think it was better that they came to the high school and the feeder schools went there than if they came and performed at our school.

MM: Why’s that?

KOB: Many of these kids, especially the younger ones, haven’t had that experience of going to a theater – the social nuances of their behavior in a theater, seeing live performances. It was a first for many kids, seeing it in that venue. They’ve seen it at school, but that is just part of school. This was going out, going someplace to a large theater. Eureka High School theater to them was very large. Going to see live theater on a stage was a first, and a very good experience for these kids.

MM: Now you are aware of the project that they are doing with Blue Lake, the ETA [Education Through Art] program? Is there any thought in your mind to bring them in beyond performing?

KOB: Well, I would love to see more of Dell’Arte, not only Dell’Arte, but other arts here in our district. Usually the difficulty is transportation, both in getting kids to performances and sometimes getting those performances out of Blue Lake. I think probably the main sticky issue is cost of transportation. It was fairly expensive just to get our kids over to Eureka High School, because we were taking the whole school. I would like to do that more often.

MM: Tell me about how your awareness of Dell’Arte before you became a school principal.

KOB: In ’77 or ’78 I was living in Blue Lake. We used to see students on unicycles and juggling out in front of the hall there. It wasn’t quite as built up as it is now. I remember one time seeing and talking to Carlo when he was there. Over the years, I would pick up on some of their performances. I remember the first performance I saw of Dell’Arte was a wonderful program, a wonderful show. I really enjoyed the creativity of picking up on a social issue, a local social issue, and creating such a wonderful piece of theater from that issue. Of course the thing that has always impressed me about Dell’Arte is their timing. Their performances are always right on. The acrobatics and the logistics are something else, but they seem to have just a quality above other theater groups I’ve seen in terms of the sharpness of their performance. This last performance that I saw, "The Rag and Bone Shop," again the timing was excellent. That performance I was able to see several times. The performance they did in Eureka High for the elementary kids had pieces changed so that it was appropriate for that particular audience. So, it was interesting to see how well they were able to adapt from the night before to a day performance with significant changes.

MM: What do you think your students connected to the most?

KOB: I got a chance to talk with kids after they saw the performance. They talked about different parts of the show. They thought it was real funny. Kids love slapstick, so any of the parts that were fast-paced, fast-moving. In that piece there is one section where they are having a party. It is like a silent newsreel routine. The kids just roared and loved it.

MM: You were in Blue Lake living as a student. How do you think Dell’Arte has made an impact on the area in general?

KOB: They are known. They are quite well known, with different kinds of reputations.

MM: What are the different ones that you hear?

KOB: That they are quite unique. Their style of theater is different from most others. I concur. I feel that Dell’Arte is a step above other local theater groups. The quality is better and the type of performances that they do are different. I’ve seen a couple of performances locally that were very avant-garde, way out there, and not working, not working at all. Dell’Arte’s are always sharp and right on. The ability of Dell’Arte to bring other artists up from outside the area just adds such a quality to our local experience here. If it wasn’t for them this would be an awfully, awfully remote area. Humboldt State and Dell’Arte just add such quality to life here.

MM: Is there anything else you would like to add?

KOB: I would love to see them do more in the local schools, but I think that is more a problem of funding than anything else. Getting them here, or getting us there.

MM: And that becomes a money issue.

KOB: Oh sure. Always breaks down to that. It cost me about $100 to get our kids over to the high school, which is only a few miles away. It always comes down to a money issue.

MM: If the general community were more aware and felt as you did, do you think that would have an impact on growing the budget?

KOB: I operate with about seven different budget areas, all of which are taking at least a 20-percent cut over the next year. That is on about a 25-percent cut last year. We are in a period of declining enrollment, so as your number of kids goes down, so do your dollars. There is a lot that has to be funded that would tend to take priority over theater productions. The battle that we have to fight on the local level is that the state is very into accountability in academics, because there is a major movement for voucher [school vouchers subsidizing private education], which is really a destructive concept to public education. The tendency is to get more restrictive into the core of academics. That tends to leave the arts out while we are at the front line dealing with kids who really need the exposure to the arts as much for the character education as anything else.

MM: We are facing the same tensions in Pennsylvania where I am from, and hearing many educators really understanding the value of the arts, in the way you do, and feeling squeezed in terms of the curriculums that they have to deliver that don’t leave time for that. I just wonder what your thoughts are. Even in character education there aren’t measurement tools, let alone to assess the value that the arts give to education experience.

KOB: It is quality that is hard to measure. You can get some subjective measures of a decrease in physical conflicts, an increase in cooperation in students. Those things you can measure. But the effect of the arts on the human experience is a difficult thing to measure, although we know there is an effect there. The rash of extreme violence in high schools gave an initial push with more money going into counseling and human services. My feeling is more than counseling, we need to expand the arts and improve the quality of life. Give kids, right from the beginning, a vehicle for allowing the expression of the human condition. That expression leads to communication and stress reduction and internal conflict resolution.

Mark McKenna is artistic director and an ensemble member of Touchstone Theatre, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He is a graduate of the Lecoq International School of Theatre in Paris. He has taught theater classes at Lehigh University and the University of Pennsylvania, and the MFA Theatre Program at Towson State University. McKenna is active in the growth of the Network of Ensemble Theatres. He is a board member of Alliance for Building Communities, a regional community-development corporation.

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