NEA Education Budget

Schools focus more on scientific subjects such as math and computer literacy and students need to study for standardized test. This educational curriculum causes many schools to cut arts education. Therefore, young people do not have enough opportunities to get involved in arts activities these days. However, it is obvious that arts can help students foster their creativity and communication skills. Therefore, many nonprofit organization are trying to offer arts education to young people. NEA grants help arts organizations offer educational activities. Especially local areas need more public grants to maintain their educational programs because major grants usually go to only big cities. I believe that NEA should increase their budget to support

For example, Coleman Center for the Arts provides one week summer camp every year. At the camp, students from the age of eight to eighteen can enjoy visual arts, music, and performance and learn how to collaborate with others to create arts. Methow Arts, located in Washington State, had been offered Missoula Children’s Theatre since 1998. It had given children the opportunity to play performance which was presented to the community. However, it decided to cut this program because of the lack of funding. They claim that the amount of fund from state, federal and local had been decreasing this past ten years. Their large part of fund comes from NEA, but their annual arts education budgets in 2017/2018 almost halved compared with in 2007/2008. We should not deprive students of opportunities to engage in arts activities. Young people can learn creative sense and broaden their mind through art activities because they are more flexible than adults. NEA should support these organizations so that young audiences who cannot have enough opportunities to engage in arts activities experience arts in their

In Milwaukee, there are some public schools where they cannot afford hiring music teachers. Therefore, local programs try to fill this vacancy by using NEA grants. These examples show that NEA can help schools keep their art resources in high quality. Also, public grants can be used to train art teachers and young artist. Houston Symphony has the program titled “Community-Embedded Musician”, which they hire a few salaried string players whose main role is to teach music to young artists and students in the community. This organization gets grants from NEA for $20,000 to maintain this program. As well as running the organizations themselves, they are struggling to maintain art teachers and training