READERS WHO DELIGHT in this paper’s longtime, front-page daily feature showcasing student art (“Today’s Young Artist”) will be amazed to see how extensively this concept has been used on a website called Artsonia. It has the world’s largest online kids’ museum of art (and a whole lot more involving arts education). There are literally millions of pieces of art by elementary school students on display, including thousands from Greater Rome.

Recently Artsonia gave Amy Young, the art teacher at Glenwood Primary, one of its annual leadership awards. Her students apparently produced 6,652 pieces of art posted to the school’s gallery on the site in the last school year ... and drew 51,490 viewers in the process. Glenwood has actually posted 18,235 pieces of art since starting on this in October of 2008. The gallery can be viewed at www.artsonia.com/schools/GlenwoodPrimary1.

Other Floyd County schools involved to varying degrees (3,581 pieces of art down to 6) with their own galleries are Armuchee Elementary, Garden Lakes, West End, Unity Christian, Pepperell Primary and Midway Primary.

Art and music certainly don’t get the public funding emphasis they both deserve and require. And while the Artsonia site has a commercial intent (it sells stuff with the child’s artwork on it, returning 15 percent of the revenue back to a participating school’s art program) it helps do what this newspaper’s daily feature seeks to do: Keep interest in the arts strong and spotlight them.

Man does not live by bread alone; children’s minds do not grow by textbooks alone.