A world with no art. . .

                Everywhere you turn something new is popping up about the loss of money in schools. A lot of schools are cutting teachers, their salaries, and even their retirement benefits. It’s a sad situation that is taking over the country and there has yet to be a solution for it. However, there are even schools that are taking out vital programs so they can save money as much as possible. Personally how would you feel if you found out that all the programs you loved in school are being cut? Sadly this is a reality that is happening in America to a lot of the students. Art programs, sports programs, the things that students truly love to do are being cut. Students are slacking in school now because what they love to do is no longer their motivation. Something needs to be done with this and it needs to happen fast, because without art, we have no culture.

                 I remember my junior year of high school I was captain of my dance team. We were amazing, winning Regionals, state, and placing well in Nationals. Banners from our competitions hung proudly on the walls of our gym and everyone knew who we were. I recall one day my coach bringing us to her office saying that our dance program along with other things were being cut because the school could no longer afford to pay for them. Either we lost teachers or we lost our program. Instantly I was thrown back by the fact our family was being split. Dance was something we all did together sense our freshmen year, and now the school was cutting it. That just didn’t make sense to me and I refused to even try and understand it. However after having my moment, I went into solve the problem mode, but first I had to look into what was going on.

                In Nevada we have ratings for our schools, ratings such as 1-5, and 5 was the best. When the district choose to close a program down or cut teachers or students they started with the worst schools and then worked their way up. However, if your school was ranked five your school was pretty much granted to choose what programs had to be cut, and you could even fight it and not let there be any cuts. This was great news because my high school was ranked a five school. So instantly I thought a conversation with the principal and the deans and any other high up school administration that I knew could help us needed to be had.

               My team and I spoke to the administration and they basically told us that if we could get over 450 signatures they wouldn’t cut the dance program. This was great news for us however sad for girls baseball because then they would be getting cut. My team was something I would fight for and that’s just what we did making sure that we got all of our signatures. The dance program was saved and the girl’s baseball team was also saved because they found out about the five school rating that we had, and worked something out.

            For my school this was a great thing. Our programs did not get cut, however for most schools in America their story didn’t end the same way. Music programs are being cut left and right. Dance programs are rarely in schools anymore. Theatre programs are being cut do to the lack of people showing up for their shows. Students are being crushed because their number one passions have been cut. America is showing a bad example for the rest of the world. How do you cut programs from schools? It’s so easy to cut other things that are not needed yet you chose to cut children’s futures. Most countries honor the arts; however our country cuts them because they aren’t important enough.