We really are about changing the way children are taught.... We're in the business of saving children's lives. Susan Holman, Artist and Educator

Danny, a loner, was failing in school because he refused to take tests. One day, exasperated as the boy balked at a test on Egypt, his classroom teacher snapped, "Well, then, why don't you just draw me something about Egypt?" So he did - a beautiful depiction of a mummy. Questioned about it, he proved orally that he understood much more than was required on the written test. Now all of his teachers test Danny orally and through art. His grades have gone from D's and F's to A's and B's, and he has become more outgoing.

In the Greater New Orleans area, behaviorally and emotionally troubled children like Danny are breaking the cycle of failure through SmartArt. A program begun in 1994 by the Center for Development and Learning (CDL), a regional nonprofit organization, SmartArt is a discipline-based art education program conducted after school for 12 to 16 weeks a year in schools enrolled in CDL professional development programs. Referred to the program by classroom teachers, the majority of SmartArt's students come from low socio-economic and diverse ethnic backgrounds. They attend inner-city, rural, and suburban schools and tend to be marginal students. Many have failed one or more grades. Almost none have ever participated in an art class.

In SmartArt, these students participate in all four disciplines of art: production, history, aesthetics, and criticism. Meeting weekdays after school, on Saturdays, and in the summers with professional artist and educator Susan Holman, groups of 12 to 15 children produce permanent works of art for their schools. Among them are school-door murals, cast-concrete sculptured benches, large totem poles, and life-size mixed-media puppets of people who have influenced history - part of "Puppet Project: Ghosts of Our Past."

The influence of SmartArt in the Greater New Orleans area can be seen not only in the lives of children such as Danny but also in the work of those teachers who are integrating the arts and the humanities across the curriculum and trying nontraditional means of testing their students.