The arts kept Damien Vincent safe when he was growing up, protecting him from the “seductive allure of the streets” and the temptations of easy money, he told about 150 people at a November arts education town hall meeting.
Three decades later, his daughter is an aspiring alto saxophonist and a student at Baltimore School for the Arts.
“Studying music can raise the consciousness of students individually and create a more thoughtful world society,” Vincent said at the event hosted by Arts Every Day, an advocacy group that works to boost arts instruction in Baltimore City public schools. “Long live the arts!”
Despite passionate testimony from culture fans like Vincent, funding for arts education in Maryland public schools continues to be fraught with pitfalls.
Historically, instruction in visual arts, music and theater has trailed behind the “big four” core subjects of math, language arts, science and history/social studies that are tested as part of college entrance exams.
The landmark Blueprint for Maryland’s Future education reform plan arguably left funding for arts programs extra vulnerable. The sweeping reform package requires school districts to spend 75% of their per-pupil allocation on specific areas, such as prekindergarten and college and career readiness. The remaining 25% — less money than many districts had in the past — must pay for everything else, from sports to after-school clubs to the arts.
“School districts and individual principals are having to make a lot of really difficult decisions,” said Rachel McGrain, executive director of the advocacy group Arts Education in Maryland Schools, “and the arts sometimes end up on the chopping block.”
McGrain and many other arts educators support the Blueprint reforms, which they say are long overdue. And they say that the Blueprint isn’t the only culprit making it an especially challenging time for funding arts education in the state. The coronavirus pandemic, which exacerbated a national teacher shortage, is a factor. So is inflation, which drove up the costs for everything from transportation to liability insurance.
But advocates acknowledge that the Blueprint can pose a significant obstacle to providing cultural programs in some Maryland districts.
“Overall, the struggle to find the funds to pay for arts education has gotten more difficult,” McGrain said.
Before the Blueprint went into law in 2021, arts advocates tried but failed to get the arts designated in the plan as a required content area alongside English and math.
“The big challenge and missed opportunity of the Blueprint is that the arts weren’t included in base funding formula of money that every student gets,” said Julia DiBussolo, executive director of Arts Every Day.
“Then you couple that with state regulations that require the schools to provide instruction in the arts but without any specific funding tied to that legislation. So it’s left to the individual school districts to figure out how to make it work.”
Gov. Wes Moore has already announced that he wants to tweak the Blueprint in the upcoming legislative session, which begins Jan. 8. But the governor’s reforms are aimed primarily at alleviating teacher shortages. Arts supporters say they don’t anticipate changes in how the arts are funded.
“I don’t know if there would be much appetite for that among legislators,” McGrain said.
What can school districts do?
Some workarounds do exist in the funding formula to pay for arts education.
Rachel Hise, executive director of Blueprint’s Accountability & Implementation Board, said these loopholes permit school districts to use certain pots of money — concentration of poverty grants that are for the most low-income districts and the remaining 25% of each district’s per-pupil allocation — to provide arts instruction.
“There is a misconception that the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future does not include fine arts,” Hise said. “The law recognizes that students need a holistic education to achieve the Blueprint’s college and career readiness standard for high school students, specifically including fine arts education.”
But there’s a catch: The poverty grants are available to just 44% of state schools. The remaining 56% of comparatively well-off elementary, middle and high schools aren’t eligible for this revenue source.
“Well-off” is a relative term. To receive concentration of poverty grants in Maryland, 55% of a school’s students must be eligible for free or reduced-price meals. In Maryland this year, that equates to an annual income of $57,720 or less for a family of four.
Moreover, 70% of the total number of concentration of poverty grants are allocated to schools in just four counties: Baltimore City and Baltimore, Montgomery and Prince George’s counties, with the result that most districts have less money to spend at the same time that their expenses are skyrocketing.
“Schools with low-to-moderate concentrations of poverty tend to see lower budgets,” DiBussolo said. “Some schools and districts have lost money under Blueprint.”
Increases in Baltimore
Perhaps no other Maryland school district is benefitting more from Blueprint funding than the Baltimore City Public Schools.
For instance, the number of Baltimore schools eligible for the poverty grants has tripled in the past five years, from 50 in 2019 to 154 now, resulting in a $427 million windfall, according to district CEO Sonja Santelises.
That money is funding a slew of educational initiatives from health care to summer classes — and arts programming.
This year, City Schools employ at least 304 fine arts teachers who are fully or partly certified, a 75% increase from the 174 arts teachers on the payroll during the 2016-17 school year.
“Concentration of poverty dollars has really helped bring the arts in more robust ways in our schools,” Santelises said at a Dec. 3 meeting of the Maryland State Board of Education.
She added that some schools now have full-time arts programming during the day and after school that previously did not exist.
“For instance, Booker T. Washington Middle School large actually put on a musical for the past two years,” she said. “That might not seem like a lot. But for young people in that community, where a large concentration of students live in poverty, it makes a big difference when you get to star in ‘Annie’ or ‘The Lion King.’”
Advocates say that giving extra dollars to poorer kids is all about playing catch-up. They say that lower-income schools are just beginning to add the music, dance and theater programs that students in other Maryland districts have enjoyed for decades.
“We’re trying to get our kids in city schools on par with kids in the rest of the state,” DiBussolo said.
She added: “The ability to study the arts sequentially from kindergarten through high school affects everything from our students’ ability to participate in state band competitions to what they can put on their college applications to the careers they can pursue after they graduate.”
Still, the funding formula changes means that many school districts have struggled to continue providing popular arts programs.
The dance program and team at Frederick County’s Urbana High School ended up on the cutting board this year, according to a petition on Change.org seeking the program’s reinstatement.
“We believe that the dance program is an integral component of our school’s offerings, contributing significantly to the well-being and growth of our students,” the petition reads.
Ironically, the dance team was a casualty of parents’ successful effort to beat back the proposed elimination of the district’s fourth-grade music program.
The board kept music but imposed other cuts to make up the shortfall, including increasing class sizes and reassigning Urbana’s sole dance teacher to an academic classroom. A few months later, she resigned to take a job in the Howard County schools, a district that has also wrestled with retaining arts programs under the Blueprint.
In February, the Howard County School Board proposed cutting 12 teaching programs from the district’s third grade strings program for the 2024-25 school year to help whittle down a $98.6 million budget gap. After parents erupted in protest and more than 6,600 signed a petition to preserve the program, it and several academic programs were saved by a one-time, $5 million grant from Howard County.
What are the benefits?
What is at stake, according to advocates, is far more than whether Maryland kids can identify a painting by Vincent Van Gogh or hum a few bars of Ludwig van Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 5.”
Studies of students in New York, Boston, Chicago and Baltimore have shown that robust arts education programs are associated with everything from increased school attendance and higher grades to improved morale and mental health.
In 2018, the Baltimore Education Research Consortium studied the academic records of 643 students enrolled in the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s OrchKids program between 2009 and 2017. The study concluded that after as little as one year of music study, absenteeism went down and test scores went up. And the longer the pupils continued in OrchKids, the wider the gap became between them and students who did not participate in the free music program.
The study found that fewer than one in 10 students who had been enrolled in OrchKids for at least five years were chronically absent from school, as compared to more than one in four of the pupils in the control group. Chronic absenteeism is a key issue in Baltimore City Schools that is also a factor in Maryland Report Card school ratings.
Tyrone Stanley, an assistant professor of musical theater at Morgan State University, said at the November town hall meeting that a public school music program saved his life when he was a bullied teen.
“I felt invisible until a music director pulled me aside and put me in choir,” Stanley said. “He gave me an opportunity to speak above a whisper. I went from singing in high school concerts to singing in church to singing on Broadway.
“I wish my bullies could see me now.”
Have a news tip? Contact Mary Carole McCauley at mmccauley@baltsun.com and 410-332-6704.