Angela Leddy’s art class is the “perfect place for a beautiful oops.”
Her walls at Owasso’s Bailey Elementary School are awash with color and encouraging phrases. All it takes to be an art person, one sign reads, is to be a person and do art. Thanks to Leddy and the district’s brand-new elementary art program, there are hundreds of emerging artists in Owasso.
Starting this fall, all elementary students at Owasso Public Schools can take art, music and physical education classes. The investment of 2025 bond dollars gives students access to free art education that otherwise would have required private lessons.
“They’re able to express themselves in ways that they may not be able to verbally yet, or academically even,” Leddy said. “It’s really opening the door for them to be able to find parts of themselves they didn’t know existed yet, and to make mistakes in a safe place.”
The fifth graders at Leddy’s yellow table agree. Art class is “really fun.”
“My parents don’t allow me to use glitter and we’re allowed to use glitter,” Grace Xiong said while she filled in the primary spaces on her color wheel, outlining first and shading second.
“And sometime this year, we’re going to be able to sew,” said Owen Fox.
He looks forward to drawing in their personal sketchbooks, last used for monochromatic self-portraits.
“If you don’t have creativity, nothing happens, you’re just pushing buttons for the rest of your life,” said Chris Barber, Owasso Public Schools’ director of fine arts. “Creativity is what makes a person find their sense of self, it makes them part of their community, it makes them a better person. It gives them something to go to school for.”
Establishing an elementary art program was one of Barber’s primary goals when he took his role in 2017. But it couldn’t happen with a snap of the fingers, he said. Securing the money to do so took nearly nine years.
To make it possible, the district had to take on nine new salaries and a whole new curriculum while continuing to meet class time mandates for other specials, like physical education.
While some schools were built with unused art classrooms, many needed to be retooled using bond dollars. Carpet doesn’t fly in an art class, Barber said, and furniture purchases aren’t simple — no student wants to sit at a table that rocks when they use an eraser.
The original plan was to implement art education when the new fifth grade center opened in 2028. When the district’s $169 million bond package passed last September, Barber and others asked, “Why wait?”
“And after we put all the pieces together, we thought if we really came up with a plan, we could do it in a year,” Barber said.
Many of the teachers they hired had never taught art before and it was important to Barber that Owasso offered more than an “arts and crafts class.” With the help of experienced leaders, incoming arts educators spent the summer prepping art concepts for K-5 students, crafting a daily plan for the first six weeks of the school year.
Leddy was working as a math teacher at Owasso but “couldn’t imagine doing anything else” when the district opened up art positions in February. The first cohort was prepared with all the resources they needed, she said, and the freedom to flex for student needs.
“Starting the program from ground zero, we’re kind of going backward with a lot of our kids and learning the definitions and new processes for the things that they’ve actually already been doing,” Leddy said.
A 2025 report by the National Endowment for the Arts shows in-school arts access for K-5 students was associated with higher rates of student belonging and largely positive improvements in reading, math and science scores. Barber hopes Owasso sees the same trends.
“We could talk about science, engineering, technology and math all day long,” said Barber. “What the arts do is they take those ideas that are in their heads and unlock them and put them in their hands.”
Barber believes arts education allows every kid — regardless of their culture, language or socioeconomic status — to find freedom in creativity.
“Not every answer in the world is a formula, sometimes the words that fall off the page are what make the greatest poetry,” said Barber.
Leddy and her students end every class with a mantra: “I am an artist, I must create. Our art isn’t perfect, but making art is great.”
“They need to know that we’re not in this for perfection, we’re in it for progress, learning the process and just supporting each other through all of it in a really fun, messy way,” Leddy said. “We’re here for messes and mistakes and memories — and that’s what art class is about.”
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