NEWS

Arts programs make a comeback to school districts

Peter D. Kramer, Mareesa Nicosia and Elizabeth Ganga
New Rochelle's Arts Out Loud event is for seventh and eighth graders showcasing their fine and performing arts sponsored by the New Rochelle Fund for Educational Excellence at New Rochelle High School.

School arts programs cut during lean times are making a comeback this budget season as districts across the Lower Hudson Valley shake off the lingering effects of the economic downturn.

On Tuesday, voters will consider budgets in 39 districts in Westchester, eight in Rockland and six in Putnam. Interviews and a review of documents by The Journal News show some positions and programs lost when budgets were cut are being restored.

"We're seeing a trend across the country of increasing priority for arts funding in schools," said Rachel Goslins, executive director of the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, the cultural adviser to the White House created in 1982 by President Reagan. "For a long time, the arts were seen as a flower that you give to children when they succeed. But we believe the arts aren't a flower, they're a wrench, part of the tool kit to help these schools turn themselves around."

New York requires art and music in elementary and middle school, and students need at least one art or music credit in high school to graduate.

To restore the arts, school districts are finding money in their budgets, using aid and turning to local non-profits.

For example, Nyack High School's new music production lab will be funded, in part, by an $80,000 donation from a nonprofit, Inspire Nyack, which typically funds STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) projects. The addition of arts turns STEM into STEAM.

Second-graders at Kent Primary School learn to play a short song in Juliana Schultz's music class. In third grade, they can start playing the recorder. In fourth grade, chorus begins. Music classes would expand to kindergarten if Carmel voters approve full-day kindergarten. Schultz says her task is to teach her students how to think like musicians, which includes learning when to be in "rest position," not playing.

Among local arts additions:

•Peekskill, proposing an $83.7 million budget, wants to hire three teachers to expand art and restore a strings program in elementary schools, add dance in the middle and high schools, and fine arts in the high school.

•After a multimillion-dollar budget cut two years ago that slashed roughly 14 elementary music and art teachers, East Ramapo has gotten creative, forming a partnership with the Rockland Conservatory of Music that allows guest instructors to work with elementary students.

•Mount Vernon has begun rebuilding its arts curriculum, which lost band and choir, among other programs. The district has hired an arts supervisor and wants voters Tuesday to approve adding seven arts teachers.

The news is not rosy everywhere.

North Rockland, which is saddled with an $11.5 million annual tax settlement payment to NRG Energy and has faced rising employee contractual costs in recent years, keeps arts funding static next year. It cut photography, graphic design and fashion illustration a few years ago, but recently renovated art classrooms.

"We'd love to have those courses come back," said Art Coordinator Karen Baumann. "We're working within tight budgets still and we're pleased that we have what we have."

Colleen Woods, a substitute teacher and PTA member, said the district's hard work to maintain a strong arts program, including restructuring the advanced-placement art track at the high school, has been essential to both her son, who graduated last year, and daughter, a high school junior.

Woods' son, Sean, is majoring in sound design at Ithaca College; her daughter, Tara, plans a career as an arts educator.

"It just exposes them to so many things and, if they enjoy it, it just keeps them involved," she said.

From left, Yoskar Agustin-Sanchez and Jaqueline Galdamez, both 11, watch as guest musician Adam Issadore from the Rockland Conservatory of Music teaches fifth graders how to play drums at Hempstead Elementary School in the East Ramapo school district.

Changing landscape

New Rochelle, which is proposing a $250 million budget for next year, lost about 10 art and music teachers since the economic downturn. Four have been restored in the last two years and the district now has 47, said Marc Schneider, supervisor of music and art.

"It was a struggle for us, but I have to say the department members and the community did not lose hope," he said.

Eighth-grader Jamaya Troupe was inspired by her native Baltimore and its graffiti art to create an acrylic and collage piece on display at a recent exhibit. Mentioning inspirations like Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, she said art class gives her freedom.

"Art class lets you express your feelings on a piece of paper," she said.

In Mount Vernon, what you get depends on where you are.

Some elementary schools have band, some have strings, some vocal music, said Evelyn Collins, the district's newly hired director of arts and gifted and talented education. Traphagen Elementary squeezes a dance program taught by an ESL teacher into recess.

One recent day, the school's chorus, which includes fourth-, fifth- and sixth-graders and senior citizens from the community, performed at a volunteer recognition breakfast in Hastings. The students appreciated the fun of a field trip, but also recognized the benefits of music, from self-expression to mastering their voices.

At the high school level, Mount Vernon has no bands or choirs, Collins said. But a musical was restored this year with the cast of "The Wiz" drawn from the district's three high schools.

Karen Zambelli, who worked for decades in Mount Vernon as a dance teacher and is now retired, said the height of arts programs was the 1970s and '80s. She taught at a performing arts magnet school that had everything from African dance to tap to voice to animation.

But the programs were slowly chipped away.

"They were all the arts teachers that were laid off," said Zambelli, who volunteers Wednesdays after school at Grimes to teach dance to sixth-graders, students she started teaching years ago.

The arts gave the students something to look forward to and instilled discipline, Zambelli said. Many of the children couldn't afford lessons outside of school.

"It made them feel special and proud," she said.

With a brighter outlook for next year, Collins said Mount Vernon's proposed $231 million budget would restore dance and theater to the middle and high schools.

She plans to use a federal grant of $1.25 million over three years to create a new arts magnet at Longfellow Middle School, with a vocal and dance teacher for the 540 children in the school.

Ramapo Central cut about 60 positions two years ago to help close a deficit, but the popularity of Suffern High School's music program is creating a need. The school expects 85 new students to sign up for band, orchestra and choir next year and the district plans to add one music teacher in its $131.7 million budget.

"It's something students see their peers receive recognition for and they want to be a part of it," said Stephen Walker, assistant superintendent for human resources.

Senior Yasuri Rosario, 18, and sophomore Larryshia Jones, 15, work on watercolor paintings at North Rockland High School.

Finding partners

Some districts continue to live with the impact of deep cuts.

After cutting K-6 art and music teachers two years ago, East Ramapo has cobbled together a system to infuse the arts into elementary classrooms. Teachers who are also musicians bring their instruments to class. They give up their lunch periods to lead Girl Scout troops and hold arts and crafts sessions.

The district has invited local performers in for cultural assemblies and has sent students to the Rockland Center for the Arts to do sculpture and other hands-on activities.

"Everybody gets a little bit of it but it doesn't (look the same) in every classroom. It's up to the individual (teacher)," said Audrey Linguanti, a long-time teaching assistant whose two adult children graduated from East Ramapo.

The losses have angered parents like Dave Curry, whose 17-year-old daughter played violin and enjoyed weekly arts classes in elementary school. The experience of his younger son, a fourth-grader at Hempstead Elementary School, has been drastically different — so much so that it prompted Curry to file a petition in 2013 with the state Education Department, demanding a review of the curriculum to find out if the district's new system met state mandates. The petition is still under review, a department official said.

"At the end of the day, I don't see my kid coming home having learned about music," Curry said. "He hasn't learned how to play an instrument. He hasn't learned how to draw something, he hasn't learned how to make paper mache."

For next year, the district set aside $250,000 of its $218.2 million budget for expanding a new grant-funded visiting artist program started this year with the Rockland Conservatory of Music.

"We really want to keep this going," said Assistant Superintendent Kelly Dowd, who is in charge of elementary education. "It's not what we used to have, but it's a beginning."

Beyond budgets

In addition to partnerships, more schools are relying on funding streams that fall outside the budget.

Last month, New Rochelle Fund for Educational Excellence sponsored the inaugural "Arts Out Loud" event to spotlight the art, poetry and music created by the district's middle schoolers.

Nyack's Arts Angels is an umbrella group — art, drama and music — to support the arts in Nyack schools. Fundraisers support their constituencies, while Arts Angels acts as liaison, helping to secure grants and keep the arts top of mind.

When band director Mike Smith breathed life into the Nyack High School marching band, doubling its size in three years, it became clear it needed a trailer to haul its equipment around. A GoFundMe campaign is more than halfway to its $4,000 goal.

GoFundMe is a direct appeal to band supporters, but the district is adding roughly $12,000 to the band's budget, for supplies and transportation.

"There's probably not a parade in town that these kids are not marching down Main Street," Nyack Superintendent James Montesano said.