Support For the Arts? Just Lip Service.

For the second time this year, I attended a Zero Landfill "harvest day", scavenging through piles of discontinued sample books, last years' fabric swatches, ceramic tiles, roofing shingles, vinyl and linoleum flooring, brightly colored rubber baseboards, multi-textured glass bock, and an infinite variety of wall paper, and carpet squares. All these items are donated by local architecture and design firms, to be recycled by artists and educators, turned into art, and kept from entering our nations' landfills.

Why do I do this?

My reasons are not all tree-hugger and environmental, as noble as those motivations might be. No, I scavenge out of necessity - me, and the scores of other Cleveland teachers digging through the piles of designer discards.

You see, the average supply budget for art teachers in the Cleveland Municipal School District is $300 for the school year. Most high school teachers have five or six art classes totaling 150-170 students. Let's do the math kids...That comes to approximately $1.76-$2.00 per student to spend on art supplies for a school year that lasts 36 weeks. And how much do you think $2.00 buys in today's economy? At the dollar store I can buy a pack of 20 pencils and two pink erasers.

Unlike suburban schools, we cannot charge parents a materials fee, in fact, we are not even supposed to ask students to bring in their own supplies.

In order to do any project beyond pencil sketching on copy paper, Cleveland art teachers most often dip into our own salaries to supplement the materials bought with the meager school budget. We haunt yard sales and the close-out aisles at Marc's. Some teachers have even been known to dig clay out of creek beds so students could learn how to make ceramics. We also write grants and beg for donations. This has been the situation district-wide for approximately the past six years due to a shrinking tax base, competition with charter schools, cuts in state funding, and a failed levy.

Teachers are constantly encouraged to integrate math and reading into our art lessons. So in the spirit of math integration, I submit this simple problem. There are 140 visual arts teachers in the Cleveland Municipal School District, if each teacher gets $300 to buy art supplies each year, how much money does the district spend annually on art supplies for approximately 23,000 students who take visual art in a given year?

The answer is: $42,000 .

Keep in mind the dollar amount is approximate - some principals are more generous with their buildings' discretionary funds, and others are very stingy and will divide a few hundred dollars up between visual art and music classes, since they both fall under the Fine Arts Department description - but I guarantee it is not that far off.

The district claims to support the arts, but it seems to me those claims are mostly lip service. I wish that they would finally put some money where their mouth is.

How about this idea? Hire one less consultant and double the money for art supplies. Eliminate an administrator, and triple the art supply budget. Then maybe our students could have an arts experience comparable to the kids in the suburbs.

The community has complained long and loud about tax dollars that never seem to reach the classroom to directly impact students. From the front lines of the education battle field, today I add my voice.