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An Open Letter to School Districts: Where Is the Money for Performing Arts?

After three different choir directors and declining choir numbers, Emma Lee discusses the impact of the lack of funding for the performing arts in public schools.

By Emma LeePublished 5 years ago 11 min read
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Emma Lee, Vanesa Bernal, Bonnie Koo, and Erica Riray Singing Out During a Show Choir Rehearsal (Photographer: Meagan Engles)

There is no drama class at Cypress High School.

The couch with wheels featured in black and white pictures of past productions still sits in the green room, a tiny space adjacent to the theater and choir room. The stage that is barely raised off of the ground and somehow runs at an odd diagonal line still knows the feeling of its heavy black curtains sweeping to a close at the end of school. A giant, opening-and-closing door that was used in some odd production of Legally Blonde decades ago is resting in a storage room a few feet away. Yes, there is no drama class at Cypress High School, but the theater is still filled with the magic and sparkle of performance.

Two years after the theater department has vanished, kids that have a love for acting have shrunk to a small group of eight juniors and seniors. Their class has been renamed "Musical Productions", but they are still alive and performing. Yet with their tiny numbers and majority of members graduating in 2019, it's safe to say that the class will be chopped away for good after the school year ends.

Alongside theater, another common performing arts class has been on a declining road for four years. Show choir and concert choir, consisting of a solid five classes per day with four different choirs, has been through drastic changes. Students of the program often joke that the vocal music department must be cursed; they've been through three different choral directors in four years, making the program unstable and difficult to handle. Fair share prices for High Voltage, the advanced mixed show choir, has ranged from $800 to $500 per student every year. Not only are the prices unattainable for all students to pay, but there is also the issue of just simple stability in the program's culture and recruitment process.

As one of the show choir presidents at Cypress High School, I have often struggled with the reasons behind why our program has become so rocky in the past few years. But this year, I realized that the answer is simple: it's a combination of lack of funding for the public music education system and the absence of support from the school district. It seems like everyone has given up on Cypress's Vocal Music Program except for us.

Going through director after director seems to have enlightened me a bit as to all the reasons why students should have access to a financially accessible and culturally accepting choir program. I've watched as kids relied on their own fundraising skills to pay for their hundreds of dollars of fair share—the money goes to music rights, sheet music, paying live musicians, costuming, and etc—in order to be a part of our program. It seems like every problem is about money; every single one of our directors have complained about how the district-given funds are barely or not enough to buy music for even one concert in the school year, forcing students to either have to pay more or sometimes even have to resort to other means to get their music.

Last year, it was a hefty $700 to pay for each of the students. The money went to an overnight San Francisco choir trip, to competition fees, to Disneyland days, to costumes, to music, to paying for bands to play at our competitions. But it is, as other directors have said, illegal to force your students to pay that much to participate. Everyone is supposed to have equal access to a quality education in high school, whether that be in the subject of visual or performing arts, humanities subjects, or STEM classes. Unfortunately, as known to every kid in a public high school, there are spaces where you are required to pay your way in order to get things done. And even after the fair share payments are in, there are still worries and careful budgeting factored into the end result of going into red with the budget at the end of the school year.

Our district, Anaheim Union, has a budget of $364 million. So why is there such a big gap in say, the quality of the choir program at Cypress High School versus the quality of the choir program at Anaheim or Kennedy High School? The money plays an unparalleled role in this scene.

Where have all the teachers gone?

I had only been to one drama performance when I heard that the drama department was being cut from school in our sophomore year. I actually didn't even know that we had a drama program—that was how invisible the class was. One of my English teachers, probably trying to help drum up support for the class, had told his students to go watch their production of Twelve Angry Men and make a report on it for extra credit. This was the limit of my interaction with the drama kids up until then.

The majority of students in my grade didn't care that drama was leaving. They were all caught up in trying to protect the P.E. Dance Department, which was also on the chopping block after budget cuts that school year. With a giant program consisting of around 30 to 40 dancers in every class, Ms. Fenton, the resident dance teacher, was being fiercely guarded with petitions to save the program. I wasn't worried as much for dance than I was for choir; I knew that she had survived the lay offs before. But the choir director, a relatively new teacher by the name of Ms. Harvey, was almost definitely getting cut out.

The unique thing about these lay offs were that they were the first time that I and other students attempted to create a change ourselves, blindly signing and sharing petitions to save our performing arts. We asked questions about why they were being laid off—did the teachers do something wrong? (the answer was no, they were just unfortunately at the bottom of the totem pole of seniority in their departments)—and about what would happen after they would leave—are the programs going to be gone too? How can a school without a choir, dance, or theater program even be a school?

We got varied answers back.

"No, we won't be taking these programs out completely," said one school administrator. "The programs will stay. The teachers are leaving."

So if the programs weren't going, then what was the use of exchanging out teachers? Why get rid of teachers that are qualified and experienced for newer ones?

They didn't answer those questions.

I did my own research. While reading through news articles from the Los Angeles Times and other independent news sources, I learned that they were laying off teachers and trying to "double-dip" teachers for one or more subjects. Both our choir director and the drama teacher were struggling to keep their numbers up in classes. In order for a teacher to be considered full-time, they must teach at least five classes a day. This requirement was difficult to fulfill from both of the programs because of the instability and bad reputation that they struggled from after years of teacher-switching. For choir, they wanted a teacher with both an English degree and a Music degree. In 2016-2017, there were still requirements set in place to make it so that a theater/drama teacher needed to have an English degree. So in order to save money, the district was attempting to push out our director in favor of one that could teach both drama and choir. The same type of concept went towards P.E. dance, except that they simply wanted another P.E. teacher to teach the kids rather than one that specialized in dance.

None of this was communicated with parents or with students. While I couldn't save the drama department, my classmates and I took it upon ourselves to gather signatures on an online petition to address to the AUHSD board. Erica Riray, now my co-president, wrote the petition, which garnered around 1,700 signatures from around the world. I used my Instagram to promote this, which got a lot of support from my fellow bloggers. After we received the slip that told us that our teacher would not be exempt from the lay off, my friends and I attended a board meeting, and then stood outside the building crying out of frustration and sadness.

No one told us what was going on. We had done our best to keep our director, and, despite all the roadblocks that we hit, continued on. We gathered letters from parents and students to deliver to the board. We sent emails and made phone calls. I kept my followers updated about the situation.

Finally, a few weeks before the end of the school year, we found out that the district had somehow made room for her to stay. Our director wasn't being laid off. We celebrated, relieved. And though no one really addressed it, I was ridiculously excited about the fact that we, a bunch of students, had been able to organize some influence to keep our teacher in her position.

Sadly, the drama teacher suffered a different fate. The school was able to keep choir and dance, but drama was gone. Our choir director attempted to bring it back for the 2018-2019 school year by dubbing it "musical productions" in an attempt to give students who were involved in theater a space, albeit a musical one.

It has always been about money. Of course, cutting costs for the overall quality of our education is important when we can. But the real issue is that, in our visual performance departments, "sharing" teachers or using the expense as an excuse makes it hard for students to focus on bettering themselves. They're distracted by the worry of not having a teacher for the next year or how qualified that teacher will be. And in the choir departments's case, we did some digging and found that the only other choir director in rotation to teach at our school would be a teacher with a history and an obscure music degree. They would definitely not be qualified to run our vocal music program.

Why is it so expensive to take part in choir?

The $700 fee sounds ridiculous to many. When I first joined choir, my parents groaned at the thought of having to pay a crazy fee for my seemingly low-cost music education. After all, what was all the money going to?

The simple answer: show choir. At Cypress, we don't run a typical choir program. We do show choir, which is a form of choir where students basically create a 20-minute production of singing and dancing that contains a theme or story. Typical sets consist of 20-minutes of three to five songs and a costume change. Once you think of this, the expenses that come attributed just to show choir begin to add up. There are costume fees, live musician fees, choreographer fees, music rights, arranging fees, and the list goes on and on. Along with that comes common choir things: bus rides, competition/event entrances, dresses, props, venues for shows, and other not-required but insinuated items such as makeup and hair products.

Many schools seem to be doing perfectly fine with district funds. The issue of funding Cypress lies in the type of program it is; show choir just naturally requires more money to run. The students have always asked for this type of program and push for it to return every year. The district, however, doesn't exactly give out money according to how much programs need. There's a set amount that is allotted to every school.

But though the directors complain every year that their district-granted money isn't even enough to get them through buying one show's worth of music, it's not exactly all directly on the district's fault for not giving enough. A lot of problems lie within the students. Many kids in choir struggle with paying the expensive fee that comes with the program, a price tag that isn't really discussed about until you enter.

What can we do?

Every year, it's a long fight to get every single student to pay their fair share money. Of course, there are people who turn this situation around and hustle in order to pay their way; take Sal Villa, a senior, who was often seen carrying around a fundraising candy box during the year. He used his profit to pay for his fair share so his mother wouldn't have to trouble herself with it.

Kids should not have to work extra hard to pay for equal access to a music program. While we cannot legally require that they pay their fair shares, it is heavily implied and is essential to the survival of the program. Sometimes there are small scholarships that are given through our Boosters Club, but for the most part it's extremely difficult for all of our students to pay their dues. Boosters organizes fundraisers every month that give back to students, but there is only so much fundraising and coddling relatives for money that they can do.

Erica Riray, Melissa Doan, and I are fighting to get AUHSD awarded scholarships for music program students so that they don't have to face the heavy burden of their fair shares by themselves. If there is money to pay for refillable water bottle stations and a renovated campus there must surely be room to help students that are in need.

Although Erica, Melissa, and I are graduating this year, we are asking for a change to come through the school district. For many of the students, choir is home. It is a place for anyone to come. It's there for people who don't have a place to eat lunch. It's there for kids who have extensive problems with their family at their physical homes. It's there for dreamers and doers and everything in between.

There is no price that we can put on the education of our children, and we cannot cut the performing arts out of that equation.

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About the Creator

Emma Lee

17 year old from a small town in Southern California. Taking it a day at a time. I'm a theater nerd, passionate about the importance in music education, and a long time stationery collector.

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