Art budgets in public schools are constantly on the cutting block. With the nation’s current economic woes, schools are preparing for even deeper cuts. Is there any hope?

Illustrations by Tim Walker

As someone who has been immersed in arts education for more than 20 years, Steve Seidel, Ed.M.’89, Ed.D.’95, has seen it all.

When he arrived at South Boston High School in 1981 as part of an artist-in-residence program, the school curriculum included music, visual arts, a poetry magazine, and theater — which Seidel taught — allowing students to partake in a full range of offerings. In the wake of Boston’s painful desegregation process in 1974, monies were made available to fund such projects in schools where racial tensions had not only simmered, but boiled over. South Boston High School had already seen its fair share of trouble, and the artist-in-residence program was viewed as a positive step and a creative outlet to bring all students of all races together.

To Seidel’s delight, the program met with success. His theater program thrived, and he felt that he was able to reach students who may not have been reached otherwise. Boston-bred actor Paul Guilfoyle (currently on CSI) even got in on the act, visiting class on a day when a student who could barely achieve focus performed an improvisation that, as Seidel explains, “just exploded.”

“We had our mouths open,” says Seidel, now director of the Arts in Education (AIE) Program and former director of Harvard’s Project Zero, a 41-year-old program focused on learning and creativity in the arts. “He was great, and when it was over, he was so excited. Paul and I talked about it afterward, about whether we could get this student to that place again. Paul said, ‘It doesn’t matter, because he’s already tasted it.’ Years later, I ran into this former student on Brattle Street at the Harvard Extension School, where he was taking writing classes. He told me then that it was the theater class at South Boston High School that led him to writing.”

Seidel knew he had similarly reached other students, but by the time he departed eight years later after funding was cut, South Boston High School was left with one visual arts teacher for an urban school comprising about 900 students.

“Providing powerful learning experiences for large groups of people is an enormously difficult task, and we don’t have the resources to do it,” says Seidel. “I don’t accept the premise that most of the education we’re attempting is adequately resourced to address the task, and arts education is one of the many compromises. Who suffers? What does it mean to a child who can’t have art? Who can’t have music?”

Unfortunately, many school systems around the nation may soon find out exactly what it means. With urban and suburban districts facing the deepest budget cuts they’ve seen since the recession of the mid-1980s — and a milder recession in the early 2000s — the prospects for comprehensive arts education in most K-12 public schools appear bleak, and even schools with minimal programs may lose what they considered to be bare bones to begin with. According to a January article in Education Week, 31 states face budget shortfalls of $30 billion or more, and the nation’s governors have acknowledged that education will have to bear its fair share. Some states have already imposed midyear cuts, including California, which was expected to shed $1 billion from its $42 billion education budget. Fiscal year 2010 could see New York state lose $700 million in education funding, while Ohio’s state budget could lose as much as 25 percent across the board.

For schools that have already lost traditional in-house arts programs and have come to rely on the services provided by outside partnering art institutions and organizations, advocates are fearful of their fates as well, with predictions, as reported by the Associated Press in early February, that as many as 10,000 arts organizations could disappear in 2009.

“What concerns me about this downturn is that everyone is feeling the pain,” says Richard Bell, a member of the AIE advisory board and the executive director of Young Audiences, the nation’s largest arts education program, serving 7 million children in 700 programs across 26 states. “This is the worst economic situation I’ve seen in my 37 years with Young Audiences, and even though it hasn’t hit us yet, we are definitely going to be affected. I don’t see a clear strategy or path for us to emphasize how to ameliorate this condition.”

With partnering arts organizations like Bell’s bracing for a multiyear effect — and the impact of President Barack Obama’s $787 billion state stimulus package on K-12 schools still yet to be seen — arts educators from every discipline admit that while they are used to the earth shifting beneath their feet, they now face a virtual earthquake of change.

“I’ll be very honest; we’re not just seeing the clouds on the horizon, we’re in the storm,” says Amanda Lichtenstein, Ed.M.’05, a poet and consultant at Urban Gateways Center for Arts Education, an organization that brings visual, literary, media, and performing arts experiences to children in and around Chicago.

“It’s the single discipline that’s always on the chopping block, and the arts, like sports, get cast aside with budget cuts,” says Jessica Hoffmann Davis, Ed.M.’86, Ed.D.’91, founder of the AIE Program and author of Why Our Schools Need the Arts and Framing Education as Art. “So once again, we are going to cut arts in education. Alert the media!”