NEW YORK (AP) -- Two dozen youngsters bundle up in their winter coats and head out the door of Public School 191. About 10 minutes later, they arrive at a small studio a few blocks away to take a weekly art class.

There are no complaints, though, as the fifth-graders trudge through the chilly Manhattan streets. In fact, they consider themselves lucky: P.S. 191 does not have an art teacher, an art room or art courses. And unlike other schools in the country where art no longer is taught, students from P.S. 191 have a studio where they can paint, sculpt and draw.

They pile into a white room and sit at four large tables covered with brown construction paper. Several mirrors and six packages of Cray-pas -- a blend of paint and crayon -- are spread across each work space.

Teacher Damilla Miller talks to her students about the self portraits they will create. She refers to the children as "artists" and discusses their "choices" of color and "shape" as they try to portray themselves. She holds up portraits by van Gogh and Brooklyn artist Rafael Tufino to demonstrate different uses of color and texture.

"Your tools are your hands," Miller tells the class. "Focus your imagination and use colors you wouldn't normally use. Think about what is around you."

Meiling Jabbaar, a thin, soft-spoken 10-year-old with sandy hair, pulls up her sleeves and settles in to work. She studies her face in the mirror as she blends bits of blue and yellow, trying to find the right mix to reflect the light browns of her cheekbones.

"I'm learning to look at myself in the light and see colors other than just skin," she says.

Public School 191's weekly art classes are run by Studio in a School, a program that works with New York City schools to offer classes both at the small studio and in classrooms.

First cut

It is among several nonprofit groups across the country supplementing art education, which has suffered over the past decade because of economic cuts and a decline in academic test scores. Art and music classes have become secondary to more traditional subjects such as math and science, which means that when budgets are tight, the arts are among the first to be cut from curriculums.

"Funds for art education shrink because of other priorities," Elliot Eisner, an education and arts professor at Stanford University, says. "Without any arts in the schools, we're going to be raising a population of semiliterate kids that won't be able to access the arts at higher levels."

Sara Goldhawk of Arts Education Partnership, which promotes arts in schools, notes a concern among educators, parents and those in the arts community that art education cuts will happen on a much larger scale. She cites new mandates from the No Child Left Behind Act, which places more emphasis on math, science and reading and offers incentives to schools performing high in those areas.

"Many are afraid the arts will be marginalized, and they are trying to avoid it," Goldhawk says.

The Council for Basic Education interviewed 1,000 school principals in New York, Maryland, New Mexico and Indiana. Its study, released in March, found that 25 percent reported a decline in time spent teaching the arts during the past school year. A third of the principals expected a greater reduction in coming years.

In 2000, visual art and music classes were available once a week in at least 87 percent of public elementary schools across the country, and at least 55 percent of those schools had art and music teachers on site, according to a survey by National Center for Education Statistics. Theater and drama were available in less than 20 percent of the schools.

Studio in a School

"I have ... two pieces of construction paper left in my room; we just don't have the resources at our school to teach art," Darrow Stephens, a teacher at P.S. 191, says at the West Side studio. "The projects they create here are incredible."

Ten-year-old John Morocho, a sweet-faced boy with wire-rimmed glasses and pudgy cheeks, is one of Stephens' students. He says his parents often take him to the park or make special dinners when he brings home his artwork. "They love it when I finish something," the fifth-grader says, as he outlines the sketch of his nose with brown. "I do, too. I feel proud of myself."

About 25,000 students benefit from Studio in a School. The 150 schools and community organizations using the program are responsible for about $1.1 million of the $4.5 million operating budget. The rest is raised through government funding and private donations.

Schools apply to the program, which focuses mainly on schools in less advantaged areas. Schools can choose visual art programs ranging from six-week courses to a three-year program in which an artist works in a school, creates an art room and teaches art to the students while offering teachers ways to weave art into their lesson plans.

Public School 171 on the Upper East Side has an early childhood education program, which helps integrate arts into kindergarten and preschool. The school also has an art room for all grades created by a Studio artist.

In one such room, paper sculptures and stories about the artwork adorn the walls. Words such as "line," "curvy" and "squiggle" are pasted on a door. Kindergarten teacher Carol Martinez Panagiotidis sits in back while artist Gail Molnar gives an art lesson to about 18 wide-eyed students.

"I watch what Gail does, and then we incorporate the ideas the rest of the week," Panagiotidis says. "She turns me into an art teacher."

"We are lucky," Principal Dimitres Pantelidis says. "And we wish we could do even more, but we struggle with the budget each year."

Fighting to keep programs alive

Faced with budget cuts in California, the nonprofit Community School of Music and Arts in Mountain View sends its trained art and music teachers to the district's seven elementary schools and others in neighboring communities. The center also has an extensive after-school program where children and adults can take a range of art and music classes, mostly funded by area businesses and donations.

"We have to fight every year to keep the programs in schools, and the current budget crisis is making that even more difficult," school spokeswoman Evy Schiffman says.

In Washington, D.C., the tiny Patricia M. Sitar Center for the Arts is wedged in an apartment building and offers free art, dance and music classes for youngsters in the diverse, mixed-income neighborhood of Adams Morgan.

The center is filled to capacity with 150 students and has a long waiting list. It partners with area arts organizations such as the National Symphony Orchestra and is building a larger space where more dance, sculpture and pottery classes will be available.

"We don't want to be a replacement for their school classes," founder Rhonda Buckley says. "But it looks like that's what we are for some students."

Some school districts have an art teacher in a school but still must turn to the community for supplies and extras.

In Miami-Dade County in Florida, a group called The Education Fund uses student art to raise funds to support schools. The group manages to raise about $2 million a year through silent auctions and the sale of holiday cards made by students.

"We at least have one art teacher in all of our schools," Linda Lecht, president of the Education Fund, says. "But we have schools with 5,000 kids, and having one art teacher is not a luxury by any means."

In New York City, the Department of Education readily partners with several organizations such as Studio in a School and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but is still forced to cut programs. For example, funding was cut last year for Music Masters, a free, after-school band that lent instruments to students in the borough of Queens. A $45,000 grant from the New York City Council will allow the program to be reinstated until June.

A new curriculum for schools in New York City is currently being written, and will place more emphasis on the arts, according to Leslie Koch. She heads the Fund for Public Schools, which oversees art and music programs for the 1,200 schools in the area. The fund is nonprofit but is managed by the Department of Education.

"You may encounter some schools where there isn't an art class, but we're trying to at least expose them," Koch says.