Cutting the budget to art programs: now coming to a school near you

hlynn117

Super Member
Registered
Joined
Mar 10, 2012
Messages
196
Reaction score
23
I got word via the social medias that my high school's art teacher is getting fired/laid-off/unceremoniously kicked out because the school is eliminating ALL FOUR of his art classes in a concerted effort to shrink the art program to save money. I'm not an art kid (drawing is hard), but this man helped inspire my sister and my friends to pursue art as their careers and their passions. So many schools are cutting money for things we deem 'unimportant' like art and music--those are the things that inspire us and add value to our lives. I played in a concert this week, and even though I'm not a professional musician, playing music brings me joy. It helps me feel complete. None of us are entirely one thing. The thought that so many of us grow up being taught we have to be One Thing or that our passions don't matter because they'll never help us pass tests or make us money infuriates me. Today, it's one small town, one art teacher. Tomorrow, it's more standardized testing, which even smart students hate because bubble tests are freaking boring. So, sign this petition. I think she'll get the signatures, btw, and I just hope it makes a difference.

https://www.change.org/p/knoch-scho...source=share_for_starters&utm_medium=copyLink

And if someone ever tells you your art is a waste of time, ignore them.
 

Cyia

Rewriting My Destiny
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Nov 15, 2008
Messages
18,618
Reaction score
4,031
Location
Brillig in the slithy toves...
Not surprising.

There's grant money, but a lot of schools either don't know it, or they don't know how to get to it.

And when it comes down to it, most schools will choose sports over arts if they have to pick one. Sports is phys-ed, and it can bring money into the district.
 

Don

All Living is Local
Super Member
Registered
Joined
May 28, 2008
Messages
24,567
Reaction score
4,007
Location
Agorism FTW!
From what I've seen, there's been a consistent drain of funds from education to administration and overhead expenses over the decades. Shop, home ec, PE, music, art, all take a back seat to ever more administrative staff to handle ever more administrative tasks. Anyway, the cheapest thing to insure is students parked behind desks listening attentively. Put a tool in their hand, from a paintbrush to a welder, and now you've opened up a whole can of liability worms. Besides, if all students go to college, why waste their time with practical or artistic concerns that might lead to careers where they actually have to get their hands dirty? How distasteful. Better that students learn proper bubble-filling techniques and the social skills necessary to being a voting, obeying, productive unit of the collective than feed one's individual needs and interests.

Public education has been bureaucratized to death. R.I.P. Separation of church and state is meaningless when education is state-controlled, and worship of the state is the new religion.
 
Last edited:

DancingMaenid

New kid...seven years ago!
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Aug 7, 2007
Messages
5,058
Reaction score
460
Location
United States
Aside from the general value that art lessons can provide for kids, I wonder what repercussions cuts like these have for kids who do want to get into college art programs. Though you can enter into most college majors with a basic educational background, a lot of art programs require students to submit portfolios and a special application. Music and dance programs usually require auditions, but at least in those disciplines, students usually already have outside instruction if they're that serious. With visual arts, that seems iffier.
 

regdog

The Scavengers
Staff member
Moderator
Kind Benefactor
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Apr 27, 2008
Messages
58,075
Reaction score
21,013
Location
She/Her
That happened at the high school where I live on the late 80s early 90s. It was a disaster parents and students complained for years. And a few years later the school dept returned all the arts/music programs.

I knew the music director. For years he had done every city function with the high school band and never received one penny of overtime. Time, travel was all on him and he did it. Since most of the cities had dumped their arts/music programs he ended up hauling boxes around a warehouse for a living.


ETA: Signed, good luck, let us know how it goes.
 
Last edited:

Perks

delicate #!&@*#! flower
Kind Benefactor
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Apr 12, 2005
Messages
18,981
Reaction score
6,933
Location
At some altitude
Website
www.jamie-mason.com
The funding is a huge problem, but there's also an attitude that the arts are somehow not educational. My oldest daughter has been pressured to give up band (she's played flute for years and has been second chair throughout high school) so that she could cram in another AP class. This pressure comes mainly from the top-of-the-class crowd who is somehow convinced that if you don't do everything to jack up your GPA, you'll never get into a good school. Flute and running are the two "non-academic" things Julia does and both add so much to her life. It's funny, the stress from preparing for a concert or a track meet is such a different sort, the distraction of it seems to help her cope with the other type of workload she's got.

The art are academic. The diminishing of their influence will come with a dull, painful price to society.
 

lizmonster

Possibly A Mermaid Queen
Absolute Sage
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Jul 5, 2012
Messages
14,537
Reaction score
24,109
Location
Massachusetts
Website
elizabethbonesteel.com
Our school hasn't had a librarian for years. Books in the school library are donated. Any administration of borrowing is done by volunteers.

We're one of the wealthiest towns in the state.

In our situation, it's not the "GPA is everything" crowd. It's the "education is for rich people" crowd. They'll vote down any increase in funding, and cheerfully vote for any tax cuts, because TAXES ARE BAD FULL STOP. I mean, really, if we cared about our children, we'd have enough money to send them to private schools, right?

I'm sorry, I'm horribly cynical about all of this. It's not expensive bureaucracy, and it's not people wanting their kids to get into Harvard. It's yet another iteration of "I've got mine, eff you."
 

clintl

Represent.
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Feb 12, 2005
Messages
7,611
Reaction score
603
Location
Davis, CA
From what I've seen, there's been a consistent drain of funds from education to administration and overhead expenses over the decades. Shop, home ec, PE, music, art, all take a back seat to ever more administrative staff to handle ever more administrative tasks. Anyway, the cheapest thing to insure is students parked behind desks listening attentively. Put a tool in their hand, from a paintbrush to a welder, and now you've opened up a whole can of liability worms. Besides, if all students go to college, why waste their time with practical or artistic concerns that might lead to careers where they actually have to get their hands dirty? How distasteful. Better that students learn proper bubble-filling techniques and the social skills necessary to being a voting, obeying, productive unit of the collective than feed one's individual needs and interests.

Public education has been bureaucratized to death. R.I.P. Separation of church and state is meaningless when education is state-controlled, and worship of the state is the new religion.

Parts of this I agree with, and parts are way off base, in my opinion. And it very much depends on the school and the school district.

I think you'd be surprised at how many people inside education agree with you about shop classes, art, music, and PE. But even there, there are some things that are better than when I went to high school. For instance, in our district, the Home Ec program has evolved into a culinary arts programs. They're basically training students to be chefs, and once a month, they prepare and sell lunches to the staff. And they do a great job of it at both high schools in our district. The high school I'm teaching at now likewise has an outstanding auto shop program, where they're training students to be certified mechanics. Some of them already have jobs in local shops. The other high school in the district has an excellent robotics and computer aided drafting program. And both schools have some very interesting things going on in the music programs. On the bad side, other than robotics, the other high school in the district (where I was until this school year) has abandoned all its shop classes. The wood shop teacher retired a couple of years ago, and the principal decided that the equipment was so old (relic status was his term for it) that it wasn't worth the investment to update it. But all that said, it's a big concern to a lot of us that the push to make everyone "college ready" is doing a disservice to those kids who aren't and don't want to go to college. I think, now the NCLB has been replaced, that there might be a swing back to offering more vocational classes, but it takes time. The nature of the beast is that change happens slowly. But liability has nothing to do with any of that. It's two things: NCLB's focus on improving English and Math scores (which pushed even science and social studies to the side), and the cost of equipment to run a good shop program. Of the two, I would say NCLB was the bigger factor. The really nefarious thing that NCLB did was hog so much of the instruction hours at the elementary school level for English and Math. My district apparently pretty much abandoned science education at the elementary school level, and now that we have new science standards that are built around kids learning science starting in kindergarten, they're struggling to figure out how to fit it back in.

However, the part I disagree with you about, though, is the administration. There are not really substantially more administrators and staff at the high schools I've worked at than there were when I went to school. We have a principal, two assistant principals, and a dean. I think my high school had one assistant principal - but it was a smaller high school. I think, accounting for that, we have about the same number of administrators per student as my high school did in the '70s. And my observation is that we need them. They are always busy. We may have a larger clerical staff. I'm not sure.

Have there been increased bureaucratic demands? Sure. Most of them have to do with states adopting subject-matter standards instead of letting districts do whatever the hell they want. And testing to meet those standards. And NCLB requiring districts that don't do well on standardized tests be punished. And pretty much everything that every other industry has to deal with to exist in a more sophisticated society than we had 50 years ago.

On the other hand, and I've said this before, the ratio of management/administrative staff to workers is much lower than it was in my previous career in the electronics industry. There are far, far fewer people in a supervisory role. There are far, far fewer people in support roles (like IT, business operations, etc). There is much, much less money spent on basic supplies - money is really, really tight. For example, we typically get $200-400 a year for classroom supplies, and have to look to outside sources like grants and donations if we need more. Or, more commonly, our own wallets. So I'm not buying the overblown bureaucracy argument. I can directly compare the demands between two industries, and I know which one had the bigger bureaucracy. And it wasn't education.
 

VeryBigBeard

Preparing for winter
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Jan 24, 2014
Messages
2,449
Reaction score
1,505
The funding is a huge problem, but there's also an attitude that the arts are somehow not educational. My oldest daughter has been pressured to give up band (she's played flute for years and has been second chair throughout high school) so that she could cram in another AP class. This pressure comes mainly from the top-of-the-class crowd who is somehow convinced that if you don't do everything to jack up your GPA, you'll never get into a good school. Flute and running are the two "non-academic" things Julia does and both add so much to her life. It's funny, the stress from preparing for a concert or a track meet is such a different sort, the distraction of it seems to help her cope with the other type of workload she's got.

The art are academic. The diminishing of their influence will come with a dull, painful price to society.

Music is always worth it long-term, whether that's what one goes into professionally or not. It really does teach so much.

Signed,
Amateur flutist, and proud of it
 

cornflake

practical experience, FTW
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Jul 11, 2012
Messages
16,171
Reaction score
3,734
I hated art class, but I love drawing. XD

Isn't middle/high school about kids finding what they want to do in life?

I'm sure it is for some people, but that wasn't ever the expectation among my peers or among people I know now actually. It's for basic learning - college is for finding a field you're interested in and grad school is for further specialization.

There were and are the people who always wanted to be a dr. or whatever, and did stay on that path, and if you want to be a vet, you'd better be involved in it from a very young age or you're not getting into vet school, but most kids I know now were like my peers - no real idea what to even major in in college.

Funding for music and art is important, but has been gone from many places for so long. There wasn't music or art in my h.s.; it was all about academics.

In many places there are YMCAs and stuff that can offer semi-reasonably priced classes. Music is expensive but worth it.
 

Kylabelle

unaccounted for
Kind Benefactor
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Jan 3, 2013
Messages
26,200
Reaction score
4,015
Signed and commented. Let us know the outcome here please. Thanks for posting this.
 

shakeysix

blue eyed floozy
Super Member
Registered
Joined
May 1, 2007
Messages
10,839
Reaction score
2,426
Location
St. John, Kansas
Website
shakey6wordsmith.webs.com
My state bought into the ALL TAXES ARE EVIL thinking as well as the "My ignorance is better than your fancy education" (Apology to Carl Sagan for the skew.) They voted in a hard nosed Republican Governor (Sam Brownback--google him. You won't find anything good.) They also voted in a legislature that vowed to block everything godlessly liberal AND to jump start our economy by drastically cutting taxes. We heard a lot of that Education has become a money drain drivel. Some thinking people bought into it and the anti-education folks were very wild eyed in their affirmation. It makes no sense. It takes a lot of money to educate a kid. We were behind in our small district to begin with. Our 1928 building needed all kinds of repairs--like removing the radiators from the classroom--thanks to previous cuts.

Two years ago a kid who had just come from Mexico asked me why our school was so old fashioned. He said his parents were really disappointed. One of the reasons they moved was because they wanted better education for him. He showed me his school in Mexico on the internet. They had shiny new lab equipment, electric blackboards, computers in every room. Their teachers are not well paid, like us, but like us, they are dedicated. -Before you start on the immigration rant , this kid's father has a work visa. He is an engineer and we desperately need engineers in our county. All the real engineers won't consider living out here for the wages we can offer. The kids we graduate usually take a tech program and farm. The ones who do go four and six years, never stay. Why would they? Our education is suffering. Arts programs, Special Education programs, Gifted programs, kindergarten etc. are facing cuts. Teachers have not had raises in years, in fact many have taken cuts. My district did not offer health insurance. Going on Social Security was a nice break for me. Why would a landless person with hopes for their children stay in this county?

Kansas is sinking in the quality of education. Check the charts. Not because administrators and teachers are siphoning off money for their own selfish needs but because we bought into the pin headed, red state, drooling drivel that education is all about high priced salaries and useless bureaucracy. The promised jobs and industries are not coming to Kansas. People who work higher paying jobs don't want their children to grow up to be Neanderthals. Anyone who can go online sees that Kansas is not a good choice for education. People who have enough capital to invest in industries tend to be liberal. They do not understand the "my congressman is holier than your congressman" mentality. They don't want to move to a state where the bumper stickers are plain scary and everyone has a gun, where the highways and bridges are plain dangerous because maintenance is too expansive.

The existing businesses have had their taxes cut. No other businesses are moving in. Strangely, contrary to all expectations (except the godless Obama Democrats) personal taxes are going up. There are now more taxes on groceries! Any fool could see that things are not going as planned--but not Sam Brownback. He now wants to dip into the state employees pension fund to pad out the latest shortfall. (There is always a shortfall.) They argue " Why should teachers, police, social workers etc. have a pension plan when hard working ordinary people don't?" ( Because we paid into the plan for all of our working life, you f***ing moron! Why should we be give up our hard earned money because you could not be troubled to study for a better job or save for a better future?)


My daughters are 6th generation Kansans. One has one of those useless degrees in Art. Ironically she makes more money than the rest of us. She lives in Florida and wild horses won't drag her back. The other two are teachers. Both are planning to move out of state. One is leaving in May. Don't worry about me. The conservatives had all kinds of "rules" in place to discourage retired teachers from double dipping but with all the young teachers leaving I am looking to jump in for a dip in the near future. Someone has to teach these kids--s6
 
Last edited:

StuToYou

Super Member
Registered
Joined
Mar 28, 2016
Messages
635
Reaction score
31
The funding is a huge problem, but there's also an attitude that the arts are somehow not educational. My oldest daughter has been pressured to give up band (she's played flute for years and has been second chair throughout high school) so that she could cram in another AP class. This pressure comes mainly from the top-of-the-class crowd who is somehow convinced that if you don't do everything to jack up your GPA, you'll never get into a good school. Flute and running are the two "non-academic" things Julia does and both add so much to her life. It's funny, the stress from preparing for a concert or a track meet is such a different sort, the distraction of it seems to help her cope with the other type of workload she's got.

The art are academic. The diminishing of their influence will come with a dull, painful price to society.

I agree with this (bold bit). I'm assuming the thinking is (often from parents), that only a few students will make a living from art, so it's the least useful. Also, as Clintl said, it's a more costly subject, resource wise.

But, without a creative element, thinking becomes sterile - and while one might pass a particular test - the critical thinking aspect, is diminished by removing music and art.
 
Last edited:

StuToYou

Super Member
Registered
Joined
Mar 28, 2016
Messages
635
Reaction score
31
My state bought into the ALL TAXES ARE EVIL thinking as well as the "My ignorance is better than your fancy education" (Apology to Carl Sagan for the skew.) They voted in a hard nosed Republican Governor (Sam Brownback--google him. You won't find anything good.) They also voted in a legislature that vowed to block everything godlessly liberal AND to jump start our economy by drastically cutting taxes. We heard a lot of that Education has become a money drain drivel. Some thinking people bought into it and the anti-education folks were very wild eyed in their affirmation. It makes no sense. It takes a lot of money to educate a kid. We were behind in our small district to begin with. Our 1928 building needed all kinds of repairs--like removing the radiators from the classroom--thanks to previous cuts.

Two years ago a kid who had just come from Mexico asked me why our school was so old fashioned. He said his parents were really disappointed. One of the reasons they moved was because they wanted better education for him. He showed me his school in Mexico on the internet. They had shiny new lab equipment, electric blackboards, computers in every room. Their teachers are not well paid, like us, but like us, they are dedicated. -Before you start on the immigration rant , this kid's father has a work visa. He is an engineer and we desperately need engineers in our county. All the real engineers won't consider living out here for the wages we can offer. The kids we graduate usually take a tech program and farm. The ones who do go four and six years, never stay. Why would they? Our education is suffering. Arts programs, Special Education programs, Gifted programs, kindergarten etc. are facing cuts. Teachers have not had raises in years, in fact many have taken cuts. My district did not offer health insurance. Going on Social Security was a nice break for me. Why would a landless person with hopes for their children stay in this county?

Kansas is sinking in the quality of education. Check the charts. Not because administrators and teachers are siphoning off money for their own selfish needs but because we bought into the pin headed, red state, drooling drivel that education is all about high priced salaries and useless bureaucracy. The promised jobs and industries are not coming to Kansas. People who work higher paying jobs don't want their children to grow up to be Neanderthals. Anyone who can go online sees that Kansas is not a good choice for education. People who have enough capital to invest in industries tend to be liberal. They do not understand the "my congressman is holier than your congressman" mentality. They don't want to move to a state where the bumper stickers are plain scary and everyone has a gun, where the highways and bridges are plain dangerous because maintenance is too expansive.

The existing businesses have had their taxes cut. No other businesses are moving in. Strangely, contrary to all expectations (except the godless Obama Democrats) personal taxes are going up. There are now more taxes on groceries! Any fool could see that things are not going as planned--but not Sam Brownback. He now wants to dip into the state employees pension fund to pad out the latest shortfall. (There is always a shortfall.) They argue " Why should teachers, police, social workers etc. have a pension plan when hard working ordinary people don't?" ( Because we paid into the plan for all of our working life, you f***ing moron! Why should we be give up our hard earned money because you could not be troubled to study for a better job or save for a better future?)


My daughters are 6th generation Kansans. One has one of those useless degrees in Art. Ironically she makes more money than the rest of us. She lives in Florida and wild horses won't drag her back. The other two are teachers. Both are planning to move out of state. One is leaving in May. Don't worry about me. The conservatives had all kinds of "rules" in place to discourage retired teachers from double dipping but with all the young teachers leaving I am looking to jump in for a dip in the near future. Someone has to teach these kids--s6
Great, and sad, post. Thank you.
 

Gregg

Life is good
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Dec 29, 2008
Messages
3,725
Reaction score
247
Age
77
Location
In my house on the river
I sat in an 8th grade boys English class in an inner city school - all the students were African Americans - they read, out loud, poems that they had written, expressing their feelings, emotions, hopes and dreams. It was truly amazing.
The professional poetry teacher was funded by independent charitable foundations.
 

Bartholomew

Comic guy
Kind Benefactor
Poetry Book Collaborator
Super Member
Registered
Joined
May 2, 2006
Messages
8,507
Reaction score
1,956
Location
Kansas! Again.
Meanwhile, there is real and genuine concern that classes in Kansas will not start up again until sometime in 2017.
 

shakeysix

blue eyed floozy
Super Member
Registered
Joined
May 1, 2007
Messages
10,839
Reaction score
2,426
Location
St. John, Kansas
Website
shakey6wordsmith.webs.com
My daughter, who teaches high school English in Hutchinson, on of the bigger Ks cities, was told to take her summer salary in a lump sum because school may not start in September. She is actively applying for out of state jobs but as the state of education in Kansas declines, fewer states want Kansas teachers. Fortunately she has a Masters in online curriculum and a degree in the subject she teaches. Many teachers have only a general education degree and some hours in the subject they teach--not just in Kansas but in other states, too. As a country we are letting our schools slip. --s6
 

Roxxsmom

Beastly Fido
Kind Benefactor
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Oct 24, 2011
Messages
23,083
Reaction score
10,780
Location
Where faults collide
Website
doggedlywriting.blogspot.com
Middle school and high school weren't about finding my future career, though it did reinforce my ideas about what I was and wasn't "good" at. I really didn't know what I wanted to "be" until college (and heck, even now I wonder if I made the right choice). But even though I never had aspirations to be a professional musician, I liked being in band and learning to play an instrument and to appreciate music was (and continues to be) an enriching thing in my life. I think we're really forgetting this: education isn't just, or even mostly, about training people for a profession.

Unfortunately, this assault on arts and other "optional" classes isn't anything new. They were diligently slashing school budgets when I was a teen. School libraries became part time and staffed by volunteers. Music and art offerings were cut, as were PE requirements. I got free driver's ed in high school, but by the time my brother came along, my folks had to pay a fee. I'm surprised the schools have anything fun left to cut by now.

And that's something people just won't acknowledge either--the role of fun in education. For some kids, the ones who aren't as good at the traditional academic disciplines, these art and music classes are a sweet spot in their day. These classes may be the main reason they stick with school and continue to plug away at their other subjects. And even for the more academically inclined, they're a break, something that allows them to shift gears between bouts of writing, math, and preparation for the latest round of standardized tests.
 
Last edited:

shakeysix

blue eyed floozy
Super Member
Registered
Joined
May 1, 2007
Messages
10,839
Reaction score
2,426
Location
St. John, Kansas
Website
shakey6wordsmith.webs.com
My mother's family was big on education. Even in Moravia, in the old country, my mother's people were well educated. From her side of the family I gained a different view of education than the one in my father's family: you went to get ahead and quit when jumping through hoops became onerous.

These are some of the thoughts on education from Mom's side:

School might not always be fun but learning something is.

Even if you don't get along with a teacher you can still learn from that teacher.

Everyone professional should have a trade as well as a profession. My g- great grandfather was a university student but his parents made him take a trade before allowing him to go to the US, so he learned to be a cartwright. He never taught school but while repairing wagons in Great Bend, Kansas (a stop on the old Santa Fe Trail) he took up a homestead and married. My great grandfather was a farmer and a plumber. My mother was a musician and operated a small business.

When it was time to choose a major my mother told me that choosing a minor was also important because a minor should be about enrichment, it should add to your enjoyment of life. Music, art, interior design (Mom's minor), Spanish Literature, advanced pottery, underwater basket weaving (Swear to God, it was a real course. You have to weave the baskets in water.)

My dad's family was dead set against taking a class that did not involve a monetary return. Since I was the first to graduate high school on that side, they took great delight in pointing out all the "silly" classes I took in high school as well as college. Dad was usually on my side. He did question Individual and Dual Sports but he was all for it when I told him it included Archery.

As I grew older I realized that it was my mother's family who went to movies, bought records, played instruments, sewed, knit, painted, checked out library books, read magazines that weren't about movie stars and took out of state vacations. They enjoyed life because they could do something on the weekends besides church and beer. --s6
 
Last edited:

Filigree

Mildly Disturbing
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Jul 16, 2010
Messages
16,441
Reaction score
1,529
Location
between rising apes and falling angels
Website
www.cranehanabooks.com
And here I was, just listening to a podcast interview with legendary fantasy/sf artist Michael Whelan. And looking at the estimated sales for a three-day regional art festival near me (in the low million $). Arizona has the same problem of teaching-to-test and cutting arts budgets.

Shakey's post about Kansas makes me sad, but I'm not surprised. I know I wouldn't choose to live there, for all the reasons she's mentioned.