I’ll be brief, some of it very local—and here’s the local part: on Wednesday, students from the high school walked out of school, paraded downtown and held a rally in support of the arts at the school—and with the specific hope to save their teachers’ jobs.
If you’re not local, no need necessarily to read the news coverage. You kind of know the drill; our state has mechanisms in place that have squeezed local schools as state aid diminished. The numbers cannot add up and you trim and trim and… lose the heart of the thing eventually.
If you are local, get up to speed if you are not yet. Jump in. The kids are asking for your support. Teens don’t do that a whole lot, so… that’s reason enough.
If you are reading this and you happen to have six or seven figures to spare in order to miraculously support the arts in a hip little town where high school students are extraordinarily engaged in them, please contact me. We can skirt a lot of heartache and make magic.
When the cuts were proposed and the students rolled up sleeves and began to organize this rally, I turned to my dear husband and said, “We did okay!” For two activist parents, an afternoon like Wednesday is obviously icing on cake (and you all know icing is my favorite part). Seriously, though, when I see that my kids are (have been kind of forever) engaged and willing to act, I do feel really good about our family’s values—and relieved that we communicated them well, or something like that. We’re proud of our kids. Wednesday afternoon at the rally, you could practically hear the parental clucking or cooing or general aren’t they terrific-ing in happy cacophony with the singers and the speakers. I guess that’s why we call our little city home.
