YES Founders' Vision is Today's Reality: Quality Education at All Our Community's Schools

What is YES all about? In a word: community. Parents and local businesses provide all the funding for YES programs, including school plays, art classes, music instruction, poetry writing, new library books, campus visits from artists and authors and more. And every student at every school has equal access to this wealth of opportunity and discovery. 

A district-wide arts foundation was just a vision when YES founders Katie Rice and Lisa Canin joined forces 12 years ago. At the time, the Ross Valley School District was getting little to no state funding for anything but the most basic curriculum needs. Every school tried to fill the gap on its own, raising funds for art classes and library books through campus parent-teacher organizations and clubs. But not every school was able to raise the same amount of money.

“There was a lot of inequality between the schools when it came to things like art class and libraries,” explains Canin. “At one school, kids got art and at another school kids didn’t. The libraries at each elementary school had different budgets and different book collections. The programs had no accountability and it seemed as if no one was concerned about what was being taught.”

Rice, who is now a Marin County Supervisor, was concerned. “The way money was raised at the schools and how it was spent seemed uninformed and essentially unfair,” she recalls. 

Canin and Rice had been the driving forces behind a successful 1998 school bond campaign and they knew that there was strong interest among parents in equal access to high-quality arts education for all district students. The timing was right to get a community-based foundation off the ground and start building arts education equity across the district.

Getting to YES

 Working with then superintendent Jan Derby and the school district’s Roundtable Committee—a coalition of parent club leaders, principals, teachers and administrators—Canin and Rice began bringing the idea of YES to the community, lobbying parents and teachers to make the change.

“We were very deliberate in our efforts,” explains Rice. “It didn’t happen overnight that’s for sure. But we had the data to make our case.”

By dint of a lot of work and some “arm twisting,” as Rice puts it, YES was officially formed in 2000. Its first funding campaign raised $50,000 more than parent clubs had managed to raise collectively just the year before—a vote of confidence that showed YES’s mission was on point. With every subsequent fundraising cycle, giving and support increased. “What made it work was a strong, very smart and dedicated group of parents,” adds Rice.

 From Extra-Curricular to Extraordinary Curriculum

Over the 12 years of the its existence, YES has transformed arts education in district schools from small, ad hoc programs to strong, vibrant district-wide instruction from experienced and credentialed teachers supported by a steady and growing stream of funding. Every year, YES adds more classes and capacity to its core art, music and theater offerings and expands into new areas like dance, science and technology.

Despite the economic downturn of the past few years, the foundation’s budget continues to grow to meet these needs. The 2012-13 budget is just under $900,000 and is sure to reach $1 million in the near future. In 2011/2012, about 70 percent, or $572,000 of those funds come from the YES Family Giving campaign and another $61,000 was donated by local businesses.

Thanks to the vision of its founders, YES continues to be what it set out to be: an arts education foundation deeply and solidly rooted in its community.

“Getting YES started was like a barn raising,” remembers Canin. “We were all in it together, building something together for the common good.”