Study after scientific study has shown it. Children who are involved in music programs not only get a more well-rounded education, but are likely to score higher on standardized tests, make better grades, and exercise more self-discipline.

But despite the evidence that music education makes for a better overall education, the arts are slowly being phased out of schools as budgets force school systems to continually pare down their curriculums.

In Lauderdale County, the Community Foundation of East Mississippi is trying to help fill the arts education gap by providing refurbished instruments to schools.

The program started, said Roman Herrington, director of the foundation, when Oakland Heights Elementary asked the foundation for a grant to help them start a strings program, which Herrington said is the only current strings program in Meridian or Lauderdale County public schools.

Oakland Heights was able to procure instruments with the help of refurbishment work by Mississippi Music, but could not afford bows for the instruments. The Community Foundation was inspired by the initiative taken by Oakland Heights in starting the program, and so awarded the school more than they asked for and decided to start a new program under the foundation call "Help a Child Discover Music."

With the new program, people are asked to donate their used band and orchestral instruments — especially stringed instruments — to the foundation. Mississippi Music has agreed to refurbish the instruments, and the foundation will then pass them on to schools and non-profit organizations that expose children to the arts.

The ultimate goal, Herrington said, is to help all the schools in Meridian and Lauderdale County create strings programs.

"If they have a strings program at Oakland Heights," Herrington said, "What's going to happen to those youngsters when they leave elementary school, go to middle school and high school, and there's not an organized strings program?"

Herrington said the foundation already has a request for instruments from Northeast Elementary School and that Meridian Public School District Superintendent Charlie Kent has said MPSD is making a commitment to have a music teacher at every MPSD school next year.

Herrington said he hopes schools will begin to phase the arts back into the curriculum.

"Some point back we made a decision to remove the arts," he said. "And we just started to prioritize, if it's not reading, writing, and arithmetic, we don't even think about it... But there's a lot of quantifiable evidence that people who learn the arts tend to perform better on standardized tests."

Herrington said that MSU-Riley Center Education Director Charlotte Tabereuax once helped illustrate to him the importance of the arts in education by pointing out that almost all children learn the letters of the alphabet by singing them.

"The arts are always there," he said. "We just don't tend to think of it. They can be on the table with reading, writing and arithmetic. They don't have to be separate from them."

To make a tax deductible donation of a used instrument or monetary gift to the Community Foundation of East Mississippi, call the foundation office at (601) 696-3035. The foundation also encourages that instrument donors tell the story behind the instrument they are giving away.