Bobble Tiki didn’t have a very enjoyable high school experience. In retrospect, it’s not surprising. For one, Bobble Tiki was the only grass skirt wearing, island-themed souvenir in his class. That alone made for plenty of name calling and ridicule. Secondly, Bobble Tiki hated school. Plain and simple. Bobble Tiki hated being stuck behind a desk, and hated reading from outdated text books and listening to outdated teachers. There were a million places other than high school Bobble Tiki wanted to be — and many times he was. This helps explain Bobble Tiki’s embarrassingly low GPA in high school.

It’s been a long time since Bobble Tiki was in high school, and it’s been just about as long since Bobble Tiki reminisced about the experience. Bobble Tiki long ago came to terms with the ridiculousness of the high school, and has always figured his dissatisfaction was just par for the course. That’s just the way high school is, Bobble Tiki has always figured.

For the last seven years, the Tacoma School of the Arts (SOTA) has been proving that assumption wrong. Dead set on creating an alternative to the education norm and emphasizing the arts as an integral part of their process, SOTA has created for the high school kids of Tacoma what most around the country aren’t lucky enough to realize as a possibility — high school outside the box with a focus on creativity.

The response has been dramatic.

Started in the fall of 2001, not only does SOTA, a public high school, have some of the most impressive WASL scores in the state, but SOTA’s alternative approach has been winning over naysayers since its inception — not with sketches and performance art, but with all across the board results that any public high school would be proud of. Not only is SOTA a high school for the arts, it’s a high school that delivers the essentials better than most conventional schools in Tacoma. SOTA deserves mad props, and Bobble Tiki’s here to give it to them.

Saturday, May 10, SOTA will host the third annual Artrageous, a fund-raiser for the SOTA Partners Foundation designed to encourage and induce monetary support from the community for the SOTA vision, as well as a chance for SOTA students to put their work on display and tell the story of their school. Artrageous 2008 will take place at Urban Grace at Ninth and Market from 5:30-8 p.m., and includes multiple galleries of student and SOTA instructor work as well as short documentaries about SOTA students. At 7 p.m. there’ll be a main stage performance in the auditorium that’s described by the school as a “multi-media performance involving dance, theater, music, life drawing, and photography.” Originally, tickets to Artrageous 2008 cost $75 a piece, but thanks to the generous donation of an anonymous do-gooder, admission to this year’s event is now free. Or as SOTA likes to say, you’re now cordially invited to attend the event as a guest of the thoughtful donor. Visit tsotapartners.org/artrageous to reserve your tickets. As of press time, all 1,200 tickets to Artrageous have been spoken for.

While in the past Artrageous has been run as an auction, this year SOTA decided to slightly remake the event, focusing more on telling the story of the school’s mission and impact on student lives, as well as fostering a discussion about education within the community.
“Artrageous is about the way we’re changing education. School doesn’t need to be about sitting at a desk. We’ve got a different approach,” says Zach Varnell, who teaches audio recording at SOTA and also works for the Partner’s Foundation.

“Lots of kids (in other public schools) aren’t given the opportunity to learn what they do best. We’re trying to bring as many people as possible into the discussion. How can you change education? It’s about community.”

The money raised at Artrageous 2008 will go to a number of worthy causes. As Varnell attests, “you can’t really fund an art school with state funding.” Much of the cash will go to hiring artists and instructors for SOTA itself, but money will also go to teachers and instructors teaching at other South Sound schools where funding for music and the arts has been drastically cut. That’s because SOTA has the big picture in mind.

It’s a win-win. There really are no losers with an event like Artrageous and a program like SOTA.

“We just see what’s going on in schools and in education,” says Varnell.

“We all acknowledge that there’s a problem. We’re trying to offer a solution.”

As is typically the case, Bobble Tiki doesn’t care what you do this week because he doesn’t even know you. Sorry, bub, that’s not likely to change any time soon. Unless you can tell Bobble Tiki where he hid that bottle of Black Velvet yesterday afternoon when he drunkenly decided to give up booze after passing out shirtless on the living room carpet only to be awoken by a bucket of ice water and the icy glare of Mrs. Tiki just home from a day of productivity, then Bobble Tiki’s pretty sure he doesn’t want to meet you. Check out weeklyvolcanospew.com for your South Sound blogosphere fix and consider soliciting relationships with living, breathing humans. It’ll be good for you.