Hello, Kristin,
I am responding to your heartbreaking post by updating an email I shared with Tracy Friswell-Jacobs from DE. Delaware is also relegating arts teachers to covering classes in other disciplines to enable smaller class sizes for social distancing. I am the PA representative serving on EdTA's Advocacy Leadership Network, and I hope other members of the ALN will reach out to you, too.
What DE, and now it seems MA as well, are proposing for "arts" teachers has been a fear from the beginning. Actually, the Pennsylvania School Boards Association proposed a similar plan in June to the PA Department of Ed (PDE) and school districts across the state, which included waiving certifications so arts and PE teachers could cover classes in other disciplines thus allowing for smaller class sizes for hybrid or full return to school plans requiring social distancing. Yicks! And no!!!!!
I suggest you look up MA's ESSA plan. Somewhere buried in it should be language about how "music and the arts" (ESSA language) is covered -- because it has to be. To keep this from becoming the norm in MA, you need to be armed with what MA has already pledged to uphold in ESSA. The language will probably be buried and not mentioned often, but it has to be there somewhere. Then assembling the other counterarguments begins, which I think begins with always saying not "music and the arts" but "dance, media arts, music, theatre, and visual arts". In other words, list all the arts from the National Core Arts Standards.
Which is your second step: Pull out the
MA Core Arts Standards and for more fodder, the National Core Arts Standards. Again, policies that MA has already committed to.
To support theatre and all the arts in your school and state, the third step is the eloquent EdTA's
Arts Education is Essential. It's an excellent document. I've linked the July verison, but check the EdTA Advocacy Resources at (
https://www.schooltheatre.org/advocacy/national) for an updated version as, I believe, more national organizations have signed on since July. You will also find more excellent Advocacy materials at the EdTA Advocacy tab.
Your 4th step is what is happening in MA and creating a partnership with other state arts organizations: When the PA School Boards Association (PSBA) made their suggestion cited above, the PA Arts Education Leadership Coalition (PAELC) stepped up. The irony was that the PAELC was formed after some representatives of arts education around PA were asked to join Nathan Mains, CEO of PSBA, in a recorded and later posted discussion about the effect of Covid on arts education. I represented Theatre as I'm on the PA Thespian Chapter Governing Board and represent PA on the EdTA Advocacy Leadership Network (ALN). After the recorded discussion, the arts educators continued talking and realized we needed to work together. Within a week after the recorded video, PAELC was formed in May.
In June, PSBA posted their recommendations and we were ready, having created our own best practices for opening schools following the format and policies of the PA Department of Education and Health guidelines. We wrote to PSBA expressing our concerns. We succeeded in having another meeting with the staff to promote inclusion of the arts in a "well-rounded" education. You can go to PBSA's website at PSBA Advocacy and Corona Virus in the Schools. PAELC
is rather proud of this section:
You can find more documents that PA found really useful for our Chapter from EdTA , PAELC, and PDE at www.pathespians.org. You can use and adapt this work for your purposes.
Do you have MA Community Network? Mark Zortman, our chapter director, and our governing board have found this a great tool to disseminating information for the PA EdTA members, including advocacy materials.
Of course, you are right up against school opening and this devastating policy. It seems the decision has been made for now. But there is the future that you alluded to including next year when districts and states still will be facing financial insecurity. You want to preserve the arts for your students beyond the current Covid response.
One of the biggest arguments is SEL that theatre and all the arts supply both curricular and extracurricular. I would ask you to look at the SEL in the Theatre Classroom Toolbox that was created in PA. There are also Toolboxes for Dance (trying to find this one! May not be finalized.) Fine Arts (PAEA Website) Music (PMEA Website). Members of PAELC had input into these toolboxex. The generic "stuff" is the same, but there are specific ideas for each discipline. (Many thanks to Cory Wilkerson, EdTA Education Director, and Leah Ball, Education Associate, for supplying so many resources to the SEL in the Theatre Classroom Toolkit.)
These SEL Arts Toolkits prove -- with strong research -- what we already know: the arts provide Social and Emotional Learning, both planned and as a by-product of creating art, that all students thirst for at any time, but especially now. We were already dealing with a crisis in social, emotional, and mental health pre-Covid. The virus has increased the chaos for students and for us. Now, more than ever, we need to educate our administrators and decision makers that an investment in the arts is an investment in the social, emotional, and ultimately that also means, financial security of our "kids" for they are "All Our Children" - thank you Arthur Miller.
I hope these resources can help you. Actually, putting them all in one place -- and there are more to discover on the websites I've shared -- was uplifting. There are resources and there have been minds changed in other states and administrations.
If you have more questions, I know other members of the ALN will chime in. They also have many wonderful resources and ideas to share.
I know this is a long post, but I want to add that not all Chapters are represented on the ALN -- and we could use your voices. With the sad changes in the EdTA due to the financial burdens of these past months, the ALN, like all areas of EdTA, is going through a re-thinking and re-organization process. But the 20 plus of us on the ALN are determined to carry our work forward as it is more needed now than ever. We know we have the support of the EdTA staff because they, too, know how crucial it is for all of us at our district and state levels. If you would like to "join in our crusade", please contact Jim Palmarini, Educational Policy Director, at
jpalmarini@schooltheatre.org.
Be well; stay well. Blessings,
Andrea