Hearing: New York City Council, Committee on Cultural Affairs, Libraries, International Intergroup Relations — Preliminary Budget Hearing
Submitted by Kimberly Olsen, Executive Director
First a thank you to Chair Chi Ossé, fellow Committee Members and Council staff, we are so grateful for your passion, leadership, and support of arts and culture in our great city.
My name is Kimberly Olsen, and I am the Executive Director of the NYC Arts in Education Roundtable. We work with thousands of arts educators and cultural organizations to advance arts education across all five boroughs and foster sustainability in the arts education workforce.
Supporting our schools and communities starts with the arts.
Engagement in the arts provides students with an avenue for learning and career development that is not measured by standardized tests. Instead, the arts create a safe environment for students to learn important life skills to help them reach their full potential — such as empathy, problem solving, perseverance, focus, and collaboration.
Arts and culture is also a major economic driver in NYC, accounting for 13% of the city’s total economic output and employing over 293,000 New Yorkers. Exposure to the arts in school supports pathways for employment in creative industries (and beyond) and cultivates generations of NYC arts lovers and patrons. There is no arts without arts education. Our future cultural leaders, museum-goers, graphic designers, actors, audience members, musicians, and more are sitting in NYC classrooms waiting for that spark and passion for the arts to be ignited.
Arts education opportunities can be a lifeblood for the almost 5,000 artists working as teaching artists across NYC. This highly-specialized workforce supplements their income by teaching in NYC schools and communities. Despite their essential work at the heart of schools and communities, teaching artists were among some of the hardest hit by the pandemic and are still recovering the economic loss caused by the pandemic (like so many in our arts & culture sector overall). Funding for arts partnerships through NYC DOE, DCLA, and DYCD support the arts workforce while expanding opportunities for our city’s young people.
We want inviting, colorful, vibrant, and thriving communities — that starts with the arts.
To support the city’s economic recovery and build a community that supports all New Yorkers, the City and State must:
The Roundtable recommends that the City makes sure all schools can provide required arts instruction to all students by:
- Baseline and restore $40M for the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs in FY 2023 to the FY 2024 budget
- Continue and increase funding to $6M for the “Support for Arts Instruction” initiative established this year by the City Council and fully restore all council arts initiative funding.
- Improve data transparency by releasing an update to the 2014 State of the Arts Report by Comptroller, ensuring DOE releases an updated Arts in Schools report and provides a school-by-school breakdown of the state of arts education in public schools.
- Ensure all schools have at least one certified arts teacher and bring back the successful supplementary certification pilot program enabling cluster teachers to earn their arts content certification.
- Restore baseline funding of $24M for arts services in the NYC DOE budget cut at the onset of the pandemic
- Increase support for Cultural After School Adventures initiative ($20M) enabling more robust after school CASA programming in partnership with local arts & cultural organizations and artists.
As our city takes action-able steps towards the recovery and resilience of our community, the City should establish an equitable foundation for arts in every community to support pathways to a bright, bold future for all.
Thank you for your time and consideration.