Rosa Parks Elementary School in Redmond is the recipient of a $12,500 grant from the Laird Norton Foundation for Arts in Education. This is the second year that Rosa Parks has received this grant for programmatic support to address collaboration of staff in developing units/lessons (using Arts Impact’s detailed lesson design) that infuse the arts into the academic program in ways that enhance the learning of children and to develop assessment tools that provide “evidence” of the impact of arts infusion.

The Laird and Norton families, related to each other from their pioneer origins in Pennsylvania, settled in Minnesota in the mid- 1850s. There, William Harris Laird and his cousins Matthew George Norton and James Laird Norton formed the Laird Norton Company. This was the first of several family-owned companies engaged in the lumber business, first in the Midwest, later in the Pacific Northwest, and finally all over the West, including Alaska.

The family’s collective philanthropy began in 1940 in Minnesota when descendants of these three men set up the Briarcombe Fund. Since then, the foundation has undergone several name changes, different funding areas, and a variety of operating styles. They focus their philanthropy into four areas: arts in education, climate change, global fundamentals and watershed stewardship. Each area has a different sub-committee devoted to selecting the organizations that should receive grants.

The Arts in Education Fund Advisory Committee’s vision is to transform lives and enhance learning through arts education. The mission is to increase arts education and to improve K-12 student learning through the arts.

Organizations must receive an invitation to apply for grants, and this is the second year that Rosa Parks has been invited to apply. While they have funded schools before, their funding model has changed and Rosa Parks is now the only school in the country that they will be funding.

For more information about the Laird Norton Foundation, visit www.lairdnorton.org.