Middle- and Elementary-School Music Festival Cut

Program was Popular among Parents and Students

LAUSD’s Arts Education Branch has been forced to slash $964,000 from its budget because of a district-wide shortfall, which has shelved a popular middle- and elementary-school Honors Music Festival. Last year, the festival involved 300 district students, including many students from Paul Revere Charter Middle School and local elementary schools. The festival started four years ago in LAUSD middle schools as a way of allowing students, who excel at music, the opportunity to work with similar students throughout the district. ‘It’s a wonderful program for a wider range of musicians and certainly gives a showcase for students from schools whose music program is not as great as Revere’s,’ said parent Eileen Savage, whose son performed in the orchestra three years ago as an eighth grader at Revere. Musicians and singers are required to audition and those selected to represent their schools spend extra time working on concert music as well as their own repertoire. Students gather for two rehearsals and work with guest conductors and music educators before presenting a concert at the Kodak Theater. ‘It is a chance to unite teachers and students from the entire district in an educational experience that culminates in a final concert which represents the very heart and soul of music students in the Los Angeles area,’ said Revere school’s choral director Vanessa Ling. The program was so successful that it was expanded to the elementary schools two years ago. Parents and teachers were hopeful that the program would extend to include high schools this year. Instead the entire program was cut because of a six percent pay raise for teachers, which was retroactive, according to Richard Burrows, LAUSD Director of Arts Education. ‘I had to make a choice,’ Burrows said. ‘I chose to protect all the teachers in all the schools, and rather than cutting them, I suspended the festival for a year.’ In addition, Burrows cut professional development days, Web development, two staff positions in his office and conference attendance (which pays registration fees, travel, sub-release time, and money for teachers to attend arts conferences and professional development). Burrows had hoped that new arts funding from the state of California might be a source of replacing the money needed for the Honors Music Festival. AB181l provides $11.3 million annually towards art education, but the money can be used only for new programs’not the festival. Burrows said there are plans to use this new money to bring dance visual arts and choral teachers into schools that currently don’t have these programs. An additional bill, SB 1131, gives a one-time allocation of $51 million for arts and physical education to be divided among every school in the state, including local charter schools. Every school will receive a one-time allocation of $43 per pupil, and the money can be used for materials, equipment, supplies and professional development’but not for a program like the festival. Paul Revere, for example, will receive about $81,700. ‘The cuts are painful,’ Burrows said,, ‘but I am looking for ways to bring the festival back next year.’