School board considers cutting band and strings
This quote, posted on the Vancouver School Board's district fine arts website, took on renewed significance for teacher Emily Akita last week when she learned the board might eliminate the district's "itinerant band and strings program" as part of cuts to shave $18 million off its budget.
"The arts are the soul of education."
This quote, posted on the Vancouver School Board's district fine arts website, took on renewed significance for teacher Emily Akita last week when she learned the board might eliminate the district's "itinerant band and strings program" as part of cuts to shave $18 million off its budget.
Akita, a strings teacher, maintains a solid music education is invaluable to students. "By taking away these district music programs I believe that the education system will be further reduced to a bare bones system. A body without any soul," she says.
Akita is among teachers, parents and students hoping to save the band and strings program, which is one of several programs and services on the chopping block in the VSB preliminary budget unveiled April 7.
The program gives elementary students a chance to play a band or strings instrument--19 schools have a strings program and 32 schools have a band program. The budget proposal suggests schools could attempt to provide some of these activities through a user-pay or a school-staffed program. Cutting the district's program would eliminate 8.7 full-time-equivalent teaching positions and save $589,077 annually in salaries and benefits.
Akita has been with the VSB for eight years, seven spent teaching the strings program that's offered to students in Grades 4 through 7. She works part-time at four elementary schools. Students are taught to play violin, viola, cello or bass in an orchestra, chamber group setting. Classes meet during school time and it's considered an enrichment class, which students take in addition to regular courses.
"The strings program provides the study of music which is important for children especially in their formative years," she argued. "Recent studies have proven that students who study and participate in music are more likely to become successful learners in that the students learn discipline, responsibility to self and peers, and can concentrate for longer periods of time than students who do not get music instruction."
Akita and her colleagues sent parents a letter encouraging them to make their views known. Students in North Vancouver, the letter notes, pay a $400 fee to join their district's strings/band program.
Marie-Claude Brunet's 11-year-old daughter is in Queen Mary elementary's strings program. Brunet, who plays viola with the Vancouver Opera Orchestra, is "devastated" it may be cancelled. She hoped her twin nine-year-old children would enroll in Grade 4.
She's collected 89 signatures on a petition to save the program and is set to speak at a school board budget meeting Thursday. "For me, as a professional musician, I just really believe children should have a chance to play an instrument and have this opportunity. I had no idea that they would [consider taking] away the entire program when it's got such great infrastructure," she said.
Brunet objects to a user-pay system. "To me that's tiering the public school system, whereas right now it's available to anyone no matter how many children you have, no matter what your socio-economic status is."
School board chair Patti Bacchus said trustees are weighing "pretty awful" options.
"This is the brutality that's essentially being demanded through underfunding--it's cut everything but your very basic classroom services and your bare minimum to operate in the district," she said. "Taking music out of schools is unacceptable, but we're looking at taking a whole lot of things out of schools that I think are also unacceptable."
Public consultation meetings start April 15. The budget will be finalized April 29.
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