The Importance Of Cutting Music In Schools

Why are schools cutting music programs? A little girl, just entering 5th grade, really confused about who she is and where she belongs in the world. She sits on the back of the bus with her friends, when one of them pulls out their clarinet, even though it’s against the rules. The little girl then takes the clarinet and begins to attempt to play it, completely surprising her when she can. She gets off the bus and runs home to her mom begging her to email the band teacher and get her a clarinet. The director unsure at first because of how far behind she will be, agrees to let her join band. Six years later, this once little girl grew up to be a section leader for the clarinet section and a drum major her senior year. She found joy in

The school has had to make budget cuts but thankfully has kept the band program. This is one example of an extremely fortunate school, but unfortunately this isn 't the reality of it for every school. Many schools in the Chicago area have had to cut their music and arts programs. They laid off over 1,000 teachers and 10 percent of them being art or music teachers. Chicago sadly isn 't alone in these cuts, Philadelphia schools have started to follow this unfortunate trend. With the millions of dollars that was cut from their budgets they had to eliminate the art and music programs (Fang). Music and art programs seem to be the easiest things to cut now. Music programs obviously are not the money makers of the school, most concerts are free and are put on for entertainment, not financial gains. In an article titled “Why Schools are Cutting Fine Arts Education" the author comes up with a simple solution, “why not cut funding equally to all programs to keep them, although slightly smaller, still existent” (Why Schools are Cutting Fine Arts Education). If the schools were able to take money from each program they would all be able to stay up and running, although they may be slightly smaller, you are still giving the students a chance to be apart of something bigger then themselves. It seems as though schools now only care about sports funding, like the football