Remarks to School Board on Art Faculty Cuts

Members of the Board. I am here tonight wearing three hats. I am the parent of three children, the youngest of which begins kindergarden at Eagle Heights Elementary in the fall. I am also a member of the Clinton Iowa Great Places Steering Committee. Lastly, I am also a member of the Board of Directors of the Gateway Area Coalition for the Arts. A number of members of both organizations have requested that I address you on these matters this evening.

The great leaders of this nation… Heck even I, grew up going to school in tumbledown old buildings; one room school houses and dilapidated old WPA era buildings that were cold in winter and boiling in spring. But somehow, with the care, commitment and passion of our teachers we managed to get a world-class education; an education good enough to make the state of Iowa synonymous with smart, ethical, hard working people. An education that allowed me to go to Washington, D.C. and tread the halls of power and engage with the people of privilege, the graduates of Harvard, and Yale and have them stop and ask, “Where are you from?”

“Iowa.”

“Where did you go to school?”

“Rockwell-Swaledale Community High School and University of Iowa, what’s your point?”

That is what our public schools are there for; they are the great levelers; the first, most important rung on the ladder of mobility in our society. This fine public education system is worth more to Iowa than all the money spent on all schools and all the teachers since the settlement of the state. Many of you may be familiar with the famous lament of Iowa governors and economic development people that they go to either coast and hobnob with the corporate elite and those powerful captains of industry always say, “Iowa… all our best employees are from Iowa.” And why don’t they stay here?

Well there are a few of us who return like salmon to the fresh, fertile waters of our birth to raise our own children. And what do we find? State and local school officials unable to simply maintain the status quo. Our legacy of academic and civic excellence is being squandered

Today we are talking about trying to save the art programs at Clinton High? What will we be trying to bail out next year? Drama? Music in the middle schools? Too late for some. Debate? Technology?

How about sports? No, not ever that! That would be politically untenable!

I’m telling you here and now that cutting the art program at Clinton High School is politically untenable. Not two years ago, this City received the designation of one of Iowa’s Great Places largely on the premise that Clinton was a town that appreciated the arts, that wanted to grow and embrace the arts. Now we are talking about cutting the art staff at the high school by two-thirds. Nice work. As someone who labored long an hard for that Great Places designation, who takes it to heart and continues to work to make it a reality, I take this move by the school district as a slap in the face.

I’m not the only one either. Neither the oldest, and certainly not the youngest.

Adolesence is tough stuff. Humans are genetically programmed to go through this change in life from youth to adult in a traumatic way. Fortunately we are no longer the primitive, East African Plains Apes of so long ago who send our 13 year-olds out, pointed stick in hand and say, “Here kid, bring me a mastodon pelt and you’ll be a man. If you don’t make it, hey, it wasn’t meant to be.” No, we are enlightened citizens of the 21st Century. We send our kids to high school.

Perhaps I’m facing a panel of former high school football-baseball-basketball stars, cheerleaders and prom courtesans and courtiers. But, I’m here to tell you, even at 42 I remember high school quite well, thank you. One does not graduate from high school, one SURVIVES high school. High school is the crucible… the forge from which we shape the metal of the future of our nation… of our community.

As a young man with no visible place to fit in, it was my teachers, all of my teachers but most of all my art teachers that nurtured my talents, that made me feel valuable, that gave me a vision of something worthwhile that I could do, that made me fell special. Aside from merely educating our youth this is the secondary but no less important function of high school. It is this time of life in which we begin to find our place in the world; a place where we can lend meaning to our lives; more than anything a place where we FIT IN.

It is this secondary role that the arts fit into as part of the whole. While the high school can still be realistically said to be operating “normally” without a well found arts program, it can no longer be considered complete; a fully functional system for generating well-rounded young people.

It must seem like it is all about No Child Left Behind but what about the children who get left behind because the sliver of an art program that is left behind has no room for them, or cannot offer them what they need. This is the destruction of the art program in all but name, let us make no mistake. Only a fool or a liar could face the citizens of Clinton and claim that one teacher can provide a decent high school art program in a town of 27,000.

Today the school district is with one hand putting the citizens of this city in hock for the next two decades for new palaces of education, while the other hollows them out. What good does it do us to have children who can do their sums and construct a proper sentence in accordance with the standards of the Iowa Test of Basic skills if they come out of the system as cultural illiterates? What good does it do us to have our children chasing the tails of federal mandates if they no longer reflect the nature, the expectations and the culture of the place they grew up in? What good does that do our city, our state, our nation in these times of crisis, when more than ever we need creative, enthusiastic citizens to help us cover the bets of our generations of folly?

Do not think Councilmen and -women that I and my fellow citizens here tonight do not appreciate the difficulties facing school boards across the state. I am completely cognizant of the pressures you are under. And I sympathize. But I will not accept excuses. Yours is the responsibility entrusted by this community to build coalitions, think creatively, find new solutions to make this work.

But because these decisions are diffucult and gut-wrenching we cannot accept attempts to deflect blame for the descisons upon the teachers’ union as was insinuated by board members in the Clinton Herald. Ah, the greedy, grasping unions. The root cause of all evil in our republic. Shame on them. All they do is hold our futures in the palm of their hands. All they ask is a living wage. How dare they?! What sort of purely political animal blames the TEACHERS for their own inability to deliver a competitive, living wage that will attract the sort of educators that Iowa expects for her children? What sort of person, just a WEEK after the governor signs a bill raising teacher pay, blames the TEACHERS for his or her inability to balance the school districts books and retain staff?

And while we are addressing the ever increasing salaries of teachers, let me just address my fellow citizens in the crowd tonight. Think upon this, if thes ever-increasing rise in salaries disturbs you, if you are tired of more taxes going into the system just to maintain as is, perhaps you might consider voting for those people who want to put a proper health care system in place in this country. Because THAT, my friends is what is behind this debate here today, make no error. Health care will be behind all the Faustian bargains that the school board makes with itself in the coming years. Fix health care and we fix many problems like the one we face here today.

But that’s not going to help us here tonight. I for one am have no problem with my taxes going to teachers’ salaries. It is in fact the one thing I relish paying my taxes for. I am willing to pay higher taxes to pay the teachers more. Heck, pay ‘em like flippin’ CEO’s for all I care. If it means my children can get the same education, the same OPPORTUNITIES that I got, you’ll not hear a peep from me about the cost. Whatever it costs it’s still cheaper than sending them to Prince of Peace.

I’m with Horace Mann: public education is the foundation stone of our democracy. Iowa’s foundation is granite. THAT is what I left Chicago to come home for. THAT is the legacy came here to give my children, THAT is the legacy I DEMMAND for my children. I don’t care what the rest of the town thinks, tax me to the eyeballs for teacher’s pay. But if you can’t do that, don’t ask me for another cent for your facilities boondoggles.

We’re Iowans. We expect better. Tonight you must find a way to pay for a decent arts program in the high school. Going forward you and all of us must find a sustainable way to maintain the standards we Iowans expect in our educational system. Kick it upstairs to the legislature, march on Des Moines, I’ll be with you. Kick it upstairs to the voters, I’ll be with you. But find a way. That’s why you were elected, that’s why you get paid six figures. Find a way… Or find new jobs.