AdvocacyReport
This article, which is part of the “Back From the Brink” series originally
published in February 1999, is reprinted with permission from the National Association for Music Education, formerly MENC, Teaching Music.
A Teacher’s Perspe by Cindy Lippert
A
As a music teacher in the Sarasota County School District
from 1971-97, I spent much of my career being proud of Sarasota County schools. In fact, I had attended elemen-
tary, junior high, and high school in Sarasota myself. As a product of the system, I knew firsthand that we had great music education in our schools, and I also knew that we had wonderful music, art, and theater in our community.
As a young teacher in the 1970s, I was incredibly busy,
learning how to teach well and raising my own family. It was not until the 1980s that I began to notice that the arts
were not valued as highly as before in Sarasota County schools. Programs were not as well funded as they had been. Suddenly, everyone seemed to be focused on getting
“back to the basics”—and the “basics” apparently did not include the arts.
In 1988, the position of fine arts specialist for the school
district was eliminated. Music and art teachers were devastated. The Sarasota County School District embraced
the idea of school-based management and decentralization, calling on each school to manage most of its own
funds and staffing. Meanwhile, state funding for public education, always a complex issue in Florida, continued to decline.
In 1995, a particularly acute budget shortfall prompted
school administrators to propose a new plan. Elementary and middle school art and music teachers would be eliminated, with the exception of band teachers. Only eight
itinerant consultants would continue to work in these Elementary school music students playing percussion in a Sarasota music classroom. Photo: Ann Wykell, Sarasota County Arts Council
special areas, traveling from school to school in order to help classroom teachers “integrate” the music and art
curricula into their classroom content areas. This plan,
implemented in the fall of 1995, failed miserably. During the ensuing academic year, classroom teachers became
painfully aware that they did not want to teach music and art, nor did they feel capable of delivering the specialized curricula of these subjects.
Fortunately, relief came with unexpected speed. In
the spring of the same academic year (1995-96), the arts community, through the Arts Education Task Force of the
8 F l o r i d a
Sarasota County Arts Council, staged a major campaign Music Director
