Artless

If Donald Trump succeeds in gutting the nea, his own base may suffer the most.

- Ted Genoways

EVERY SPRING, Sally Ritzdorf, a second and third-grade teacher at Howells Community Catholic School in Howells, Nebraska, loads 25 students onto a school bus bound for Omaha. It’s a 90-minute ride, so the kids pass many miles ignoring the John Deere tractors pulling planters across freshly tilled fields in favor of watching videos on their phones or playing on their handheld game systems. But when they reach the edge of the city, the devices get put away, and the students grow wide-eyed. “If you could hear them when they’re just riding on the bus,” Ritzdorf says with a laugh. “Oohing and ahhing at the traffic and the large buildings.” For some of these kids from a town of barely 550 people, this is the first time they have ever been to a city—or been able to experience some of what a city has to offer.

The kids at Howells Community Catholic go through a three-year rotation of field trips to Omaha, visiting the Joslyn Art Museum, the Rose Theater, and the Omaha Symphony Orchestra. This year, the students prepared for months to hear the orchestra, listening to recordings, learning about different composers, and traveling to Howells-Dodge Consolidated High School to see some of the instruments. Even the high school is too small to have a full orchestra, so as the students file into the performance in Omaha, they are often seeing the entire complement of instruments for the first time. Ritzdorf loves the sound of their excited whispers. “There’s the bass! There’s the timpani!” But the real payoff, she says, is when the musicians lift their instruments and await the conductor’s cue. “The look on the students’ faces is priceless when they see the orchestra begin to play for the first time and see just how the real instruments work together to make the music we have been listening to for months.”