First the state of California… now we have San Francisco investing heavily to provide arts education to every child. This is a trend we like!
Visual, performing arts to be reborn in schools as city frees funding – Every public student to benefit from comprehensive program after years of spotty offerings
San Francisco educators will raise the curtain today on a new, multimillion-dollar plan to bring visual and performing arts back into every city school beginning this year.
The new Arts Education Master Plan has been two years in the making — but has been percolating for more than 25 years in the minds of arts educators who saw their programs dry up in the wake of Proposition 13, passed in 1978.
With city money available at last, the new plan is intended to transform the district's spotty arts offerings into a creative program available to every student in every school.
"This is life and death — the difference between hope and no hope," said the district's artistic director, Susan Stauter, who helped develop the plan. "It's about equity. Every child — no matter which school they attend, which neighborhood they live in, or how active their parents are — needs their creative voice nurtured and developed."
The Master Plan makes San Francisco a rarity among California school districts, few of which have comprehensive arts programs for their students. Parent Anitra Baker, who lives in the city's Fillmore neighborhood, is already questioning her decision to place four children in private school this
year.
"If they brought the arts program back into a school in my community, most definitely, I would enroll them back into the school — and I'd help out with the arts program as best as I could," said Baker, who pulled her children out of public school after officials closed John Swett Elementary in June.
Baker may need to pay a visit to the enrollment office soon because Interim Superintendent Gwen Chan, Mayor Gavin Newsom and Stauter — a former director of the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco — will officially announce today that arts are back.
For the last two years, Stauter joined other arts educators, school principals, community leaders, foundation executives and city officials in the pleasurable task of laying out a comprehensive plan for how the school district should spend more than $50 million that will be available — just for the
arts — through 2014.
The money will come from the 2004 voter-approved Proposition H, which gives the arts $2.2 million this year, $3.3 million next year, $5 million the year after that, and $6.6 million each year from 2009 to 2014.
And that's just the city-funded portion. For the first time, the state also will hand out arts money — $605 million in arts education funds during 2006-07 — and $105 million annually in subsequent years.
"I'm rich!" said 16-year-old Julie Caccavo, a junior at Balboa High, who had expressed a teenager's typical late-afternoon lament just a few moments earlier, "I'm tired."
But Julie, a self-described theater freak who is enrolled in her school's visual and performing arts concentration, perked up when she heard that every city high school will receive quadruple the amount of money they got last year from the arts: $20 per student, up from $5. The funding will increase in future
years, according to the plan. "I personally adore art," she said. "I love it. It makes me happy and calms me down."
Like Balboa, many city schools already have some art programs, but not all do. Many have had to pay for their programs through the PTA, whose budgets are only as rich as the parents are generous.
Before Prop. H, the arts landscape was pretty bleak. The school district provided no funding for art supplies and materials, although most middle and high schools found a way to offer some art and music classes. City Hall gave $23 per student for these things — but only in elementary schools. Yet, no elementary school had drama or dance, and only designated schools with needy populations got music in grades four and five.
Now, all that will change.
Under the new Arts Education Master Plan, beginning this year, every school will have an arts coordinator as the point person for the program. Every school will have a budget to use for art supplies, music, dance, teachers, professional development or visiting artists.
First the state of California… now we have San Francisco investing heavily to provide arts education to every child. This is a trend we like!Visual, performing arts to be reborn in schools as city frees funding – Every public student to benefit from comprehensive program after years of spotty offerings
San Francisco educators will raise the curtain today on a new, multimillion-dollar plan to bring visual and performing arts back into every city school beginning this year.
Stauter said creativity in school has been stifled since the 2002 implementation of No Child Left Behind, the federal education act that requires all public schools to continuously raise test scores in reading and math.
"We live in a time of testing, when education is too often reduced to simple right and wrong answer," she said. "Van Gogh and Picasso were not concerned with right and wrong.
"The goal of the new plan is to nurture the creative voices of the children of San Francisco at a time when it's never been more important."
