Tucson Pima Arts Council awarded its 1st Lummie Award in Arts Education to OMA. [year?] This award is presented to those who have helped to shape the arts experience in Tucson.

In 2001, TUSD was awarded a Model Development and Dissemination Grant by the federal government to implement and evaluate a curricular model emphasizing an arts-integration approach to teaching academic standards in reading, writing and mathematics to raise student achievement. The model was developed after extensive research on multiple intelligences and the neurological development of children.

In the three years of grant-funded research, results dramatically demonstrated that students in the OMA schools consistently outperformed the students in comparison schools in all tested areas. This success is true for students of all ethnicities, but gains by Hispanic students are even higher than for other populations. This factor has created a great deal of attention and exposure and the OMA Project has been featured as a “best practice” model by Arizona’s State Superintendent of Public Instruction, and was featured in the U.S. Secretary of Education’s monthly newsletter.

In spring of 2005, OMA Foundation received a $10,000 Challenge Grant from the Stocker Foundation.  This money supplemented other funding raised by the OMA Foundation Board of Directors to hire its first Executive Director to run the newly established 501(c)3.  The Board felt this step was critical in order to fully realize the OMA Foundation’s mission of supporting the OMA Program in Tucson Unified School District (TUSD) and elsewhere.

In 2006, the OMA Foundation was awarded an additional $15,000 from the Stocker Foundation.  These funds will be used to provide continuing funding for the Executive Director position and a part-time administrative assistant.

Arizona Commission on the Arts granted funds to the OMA Foundation to support and expand the OMA program throughout Arizona allowing the program to hire a full-time executive director qualified in fundraising the arts and management required to meet this goal.  The new director will secure funds to sustain OMA, create a statewide expansion plan and develop resources to expand the number of teaching artists and arts specialists; thereby expanding the number of children impacted by OMA’s arts immersion program.

This grant, $40,000 per year for two years, was awarded to the OMA Foundation for the First Grade Opera Project.  University of Arizona graduate students in opera provided opera experiences to enhance language and writing abilities.  Students create and perform original operas based on well known literary works.  The Opera Component is a powerful vehicle in accelerating skill acquisition in reading, speaking and writing in all first grade students, but most dramatically in assisting non-native speakers to acquire English.  A minimum of 5 years research was needed to ensure the credibility and future funding of this model.  The funding granted by the Marshall Foundation was to complete the final two years of research.

The Glassman Foundation has assisted the OMA program with the 2006 OMA Showcase.  These gifts have helped to inform the Tucson community about the OMA program, curriculum, arts integration model, and research.

In March 2006, The American Music Conference announced that our community was one of the “Best 100 Communities for Music Education in America”.  The 2006 roster included school districts from 31 states whose commitment to quality music education-measured across a variety of economic, curricular and programmatic criteria-has enabled them to stand out despite the many pressures on music and arts programs across the country.
          
Thousands of public school and independent teachers, school and district administrators, school board members, parents and community leaders representing communities in all 50 states participated in the Web-based survey.