A new $12-million gift to the University of Utah, from the Sorenson Legacy Foundation, in Salt Lake City, will help give local schoolchildren greater access to arts education, according to The Salt Lake Tribune.

The gift, announced on August 11, will help defray the costs of constructing the $30-million Beverley Taylor Sorenson Arts and Education Complex, slated to open in late 2011. It will also support a new interdisciplinary program at the university that will give Utah schoolchildren opportunities to learn about music, dance, and visual arts. The state’s public schools have seen cutbacks in arts education in recent years.

“I feel overwhelmed,” Beverly Sorenson, a former schoolteacher and the widow of the entrepreneur James Sorenson, said at the ceremony announcing her family’s gift, the university’s largest ever gift supporting the arts. “Art education is essential to the success of children as individuals and as citizens. But no single group can bring quality art teaching programs to Utah schools. We all have to work together.”

The Utah program, a partnership between the colleges of Fine Arts and Education, will train teachers across academic and artistic disciplines to teach kids how to draw, sing, dance, act, and sculpt. In June, Ms. Sorenson gave $4.5 million to Brigham Young University to support a similar program.

Said Michael Young, president of the University of Utah, “Integrating arts into the education of our young students early in their development will have a profound effect on their future learning, not only in the arts but in all areas, including math, sciences, and language.”