© 2024 KGOU
News and Music for Oklahoma
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Program Assists Plaza Towers, Briarwood Elementary Students Through Therapeutic Art

Art Feeds

Meg Bourne is the founder of Art Feeds, a non-profit organization based in Joplin, Missouri, which expanded to trauma therapy after an F5 tornado swept through her city in 2011. 

She remembers seeing the media coverage from Oklahoma and thinking it was all too familiar. 

“On the day of the disaster, it really resonated with us watching all these news stories because it looked exactly like Joplin and what we had experienced in Joplin, and all we could think was, ‘How do we get to those kids?’” she said.

Bourne says Moore’s tornado was all the worse because it happened during the school day when children were there.

“What we continued to say was our worst nightmare we watched happen on the news in Moore,” Bourne said.

So she called Rebecca McLaughlin with Moore Public Schools and arranged to teach a free, 12-lesson therapeutic art series to students at the Briarwood and Plaza Towers Elementary Schools, which were destroyed by the tornado.

McLaughlin is the gifted education and fine arts coordinator for the district.  She thinks the program, which starts Monday, will complement other efforts within the schools, like counseling.

“Art Feeds is a little different because kids will be able to use either art or journaling, drawing, painting to kind of ease some of that anxiety,” McLaughlin said. “So it’s a little bit of a different approach. But I think it will just be one of the tools that we use as a school system to help those kids who've been through so much.”

The program trains volunteers to be art educators through a series of videos and lessons from social worker Kimberly Fielding who works at the Ozark Center in Joplin. Fielding says art is powerful for kids dealing with any kind of trauma because it creates something positive out of a child’s worry.

“So art helps redirect that energy, be able to stay focused on what's creating that anxiety and work through it rather than stuff it somewhere where it can't be dealt with,” Fielding said.

Though it’s been almost eight months since the tornado destroyed the schools, Fielding thinks starting now may actually be better for the students because they’ve had a chance to process what happened to them.

“It can actually become a way that they can show, ‘Hey, this is where I've become strong. This is how I've become a stronger person or here's how I have noticed heroes or I’ve changed my perspectives on things.’” she said.

“They’ve allowed time to be able to identify and recognize those things as well as the uncomfortable aspects of weather is always with us, I need to have a plan and that's actually a healthy thing,” Fielding said.

The student to educator ratio is 4:1, so each teacher spends plenty of time with the kids, which is important considering the teams only have 30 minutes once a week with each group of students.  

Art Feeds founder Meg Bourne says the small ratio is critical in art therapy classes.

“When a student is creating and maybe they're saying things that they might not otherwise say, or drawing something that's important for an adult to see, if it's one teacher in a classroom of 25, that's sometimes hard to catch,” she said. 

The 12-week Art Feeds trauma program is scheduled to end shortly before the next storm season comes.

Moore Public School’s Rebecca McLaughlin says she hopes students will continue to utilize art throughout the year to deal with any kind of emotion they experience.

_______________________

Ahead of the Storm: The Oklahoma Tornado Project stories are produced by KGOU News, with funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Reports may be used in any media with appropriate credit given to KGOU and CPB. For details, refer to our Terms of Use.

More News
Support nonprofit, public service journalism you trust. Give now.