Focus on TUSD - September 2007

OMA Benefactor Receives $100,000 Prize from San Francisco Think Tank - Prize Money Will Go to OMA
Gene Jones, the 91-year-old powerhouse and major benefactor behind the TUSD Opening Minds through the Arts program, has just given the $100,000 national prize he recently won to OMA.

The Purpose Prize is given to trailblazing retired people who develop creative and effective solutions to social issues in this country. It's given by San Francisco-based Civic Ventures, a think tank and incubator for generating ideas and inventing programs to help society, according to its Web site.

Jones survived the initial cut of about 1,200 nominees to 60, and then advanced through the next cut to the final 15. He was one of the five nominees who received $100,000. The other 10 nominees received $10,000 each.

As Jones moved through the award notification process, he repeatedly said he would give his award money to OMA, no matter how much it was. The prize money will boost OMA's $700,000 operating budget for the 2007-08 school year. This year, for the first time, the TUSD Governing Board allocated $500,000 for OMA programs. The District hopes to implement OMA in many more schools, and, eventually take the program nationwide.

But OMA owes its first steps and its ongoing journey to Jones. After a lifetime of buying businesses and re-selling them after he'd improved them, Jones implemented OMA seven years ago. Now, as a nationally recognized program reaching 19,000 students in more than 41 TUSD elementary and middle schools, OMA was inspired by research showing the connection between brain development and music.

Although Jones' fierce advocacy guided OMA, he is not an educator or musician. He said his musical ability consists of operating a five-disc CD player. But he does that really well, as he has done everything in his life.

He patterned OMA after a similar program in Winston-Salem, N.C., schools that Peter Perret, the music director of that area's symphony, started. Jones heard about that program that he said "changed my life" quite by accident.

Jones was attending the American Symphony Orchestra League conference in St. Paul, Minn., in 2000 as the incoming president of the Tucson Symphony Orchestra, when he discovered he didn't have a seminar scheduled one afternoon. Checking his schedule in the hall, he decided to open the closest door. Inside that room, Perret was describing his innovative music program.

"In retrospect, if I had checked my schedule one minute later in the hall that day, I would have gone into another door, and one minute earlier, I would have been in another door," Jones said. "So my involvement with OMA is the result of a series of unbelievable coincidences."

Perret told his audience that the Winston-Salem public school district chose a school that was half-white and half-black to serve as a pilot project testing whether music could be used as a teaching tool. In that school, 75 percent of the students were living in poverty and test scores had been 35 to 40 percent, Jones said.

In the pilot program, students all took the same test at the end of the school year. In the first year, first-graders took the test. The second year; first- and second-graders took the test, and in the third year, the first- second- and third-graders took the test. After those three years, students' test scores had increased to 80 to 85 percent.

"I came out of that seminar feeling 10 feet tall," Jones remembers. "If music could do that, I wanted to do that in Tucson for our students, and we'd do it better."

He enlisted the help of TUSD educators Carroll Rinehart and Joan Ashcraft, who were part of Jones' six-member team that visited the North Carolina schools for three-days.

Armed with his findings Jones began looking for funding for a TUSD program. When he couldn't get an appointment with either the TUSD or the University of Arizona grant writing departments, he contacted a retired grant writer to prepare the application. As a result, the District received a $2.6 million, three-year grant from the U.S. Department of Education to fund an after-school program, Project Shine, which Jones said was the forerunner to OMA.

Project Shine, involving two-dozen community resources, started in November 2000, and is still operating. When the grant period expired, other funding sources and Jones' personal donations kept the program going. Jones estimated that he has invested well over $1 million in TUSD arts programs.

In TUSD schools, OMA started out small as a music integration program for kindergarteners in three schools for 32 weeks, doubling North Carolina's 16-week program.

Jones credits Ashcraft, the Fine Arts Department director and the OMA director, for much of OMA's success. "I have tremendous respect for her," he said. "I don't get involved in her decision making. I give her the money and she uses the money as it's needed."

He's noticed that OMA inspires passion in the teachers, but said that the enthusiasm begins with the school principals who support and encourage the staff. OMA employs music specialists for schools participating in the program. It has funded projects such as the first-grade operas that students write and produce with the help of OMA staff.

Jones is convinced OMA has produced positive results in the lives of students. "I get a kick out of going into classes and sitting with students and watching their enthusiasm," he said. And he treasures the stack of letters children have sent him, telling him what OMA means to them.

"You can tell the difference in an OMA school," Jones said. "Baroque music is played in the halls. It matches a person's heartbeat. We don't know what happens at home the night before, so we create a safe environment with music and art in the halls.

He has helped OMA grow and succeed in the same ways he directed his businesses. "I get good people who know what they're doing and can make good decisions and then I support them," he explained. "Those are the people who deserve the credit. I provide the resources and then get out of the way and let them do their job."

Gene Jones Bio

-- By Sharon Dunham
Communications & Media Relations