Why Fine Arts Should Get More School Funding Than Sports: What I Saw Volunteering at My Kid’s Middle School
Last Tuesday, I spent an hour after drop-off volunteering in my 7th grader Lila’s middle school art room, and the first thing I noticed was the glue sticks. There were 22 kids in the room, and eight working glue sticks, the rest crusted over or twisted all the way up with no way to push them back down. Ms. Hale, the art teacher, had a pack of new ones in her desk drawer she’d bought on her own Target run the weekend before, along with three tubes of cobalt blue acrylic paint the district budget wouldn’t cover.
The room’s electric kiln broke back in October, and a replacement is $6,000, a line item that got cut from this year’s budget without much discussion. The clay coil pots the kids spent three weeks hand-building sit stacked on a metal shelf by the window, slowly air-drying. Javi, a quiet 8th grader who sits next to Lila at the mural table, told me he’d planned to give his to his abuela for Christmas, etched with her name along the rim. He’s still going to give it to her, he said, even if it’s not hard and fired the way it’s supposed to be.
I left the art room around 10 to drop off a box of granola bars I’d brought for after-school art club, and cut through the main gym on my way to the parking lot. That’s where I saw the new scoreboard. It hung bright and glossy above the basketball court, with LED lights that could show player stats and replay clips, and I remembered from last month’s PTA email it cost $28,000, paid for entirely by the athletic booster club. The boys’ basketball team was running drills in brand new custom uniforms and matching warm-up hoodies, and the athletic director was leaning against the bleachers talking to a parent about resurfacing the six tennis courts this spring, another $40,000 project already half-funded.
I’m not anti-sports, for the record. My 10th grade son Milo has played rec and school soccer since he was 6, and I work the snack bar at every home game, help pack team snacks, and cheer so loud my throat goes hoarse. I know sports give kids a place to move, to learn how to win and lose with other people, to build bonds that stick for years. But standing in that gym, fresh from the art room where kids were sharing glue sticks and waiting on a kiln no one would pay to fix, it hit me how lopsided school funding has gotten, and why fine arts don’t just deserve equal funding—they deserve more, right now, to catch up.
Lila tried volleyball last year, same as a lot of her friends. She hated every minute of it. She’s quiet, hates being put on the spot in front of crowds, and would spiral for days if she missed a serve and felt like she’d let the whole team down. Most Mondays, I had to nudge her out the door three times before she’d grab her backpack and head to school. This year, she joined art club, and everything shifted. She sets her sketchbook by the front door the night before, so she doesn’t forget it. She rambles through dinner about perspective practice and the mural the club is painting for the library hallway, and I haven’t had to fight her to go to school on a Monday in three months.
That’s not some vague, feel-good take about creativity. It’s what happens when a kid finds a space that doesn’t run on scores, or wins, or being the best on the team. It’s a space where messing up just means you adjust. Last month, she spilled a whole cup of blue watercolor across the sky of a landscape she’d been working on for two weeks. She didn’t cry, or ask to start over. She turned the splotch into the canopy of a big oak tree, and Ms. Hale hung it on the classroom wall. No one benched her for the mistake. No one added a loss to the team’s record. It just was what it was, and she made something new out of it.
Ms. Hale told me last week that she’s noticed how art class ties to other school work for her students, just from casual check-ins. Three of her 8th grade students told her their biology lab report grades went up a full letter after they started doing still life drawing, because they got used to noticing small, specific details they would have missed before. Kids who struggle to sit still through math lectures can spend 45 minutes focused on shading a drawing, building the same muscle of sustained focus that math worksheets are supposed to build, just in a format that works for their brain. A lot of these kids don’t get that anywhere else in the school day. Sports work great for kids who thrive on competition and group energy, but for the kids who don’t— the quiet ones, the neurodivergent ones, the kids who hate being watched while they learn—fine arts are often the only reason they feel connected to school at all.
I went to the district’s annual budget hearing last month, and I saw why this gap stays so wide. There were 27 people signed up to speak during public comment, and 24 of them were there to ask the board to fund a new boys’ lacrosse team. Only three of us were there to talk about fine arts funding. It’s not that parents don’t care about art. It’s that sports are loud. Games are every week, there are trophies in the front hallway, parents get together for tailgates and fundraisers that feel like social events. Art shows happen one night a semester, in a back classroom, and most kids don’t bring home trophies for their drawings. The need is quieter, so it gets overlooked.
I didn’t go to that meeting to demand we cut all sports funding, or anything close to it. I just asked the board to shift 10% of the district’s annual athletic surplus to fine arts supply and repair budgets, and a handful of other parents have started small, low-lift changes that don’t require a big school board fight. For one thing, most PTA fundraisers let you earmark your donation for a specific program, even if no one advertises it. I wrote “art room glue sticks and acrylic paint” on the memo line of my fall jog-a-thon donation, and mentioned it to a handful of other parents in my grade group chat. We raised $187 for the art room that day, no extra work, no extra meetings.
I also asked Ms. Hale for her Amazon supply wish list, which she’d never shared anywhere because she didn’t want to “bother” parents. I posted the link to our grade Facebook group, and half the list—new paintbrushes, construction paper, charcoal pencils—was bought in 48 hours. Most items were under $10. For teachers I’ve talked to, the biggest small shift is bringing actual student work to budget meetings, instead of just talking about test scores or abstract benefits. Ms. Hale brought Javi’s un-fired coil pot to the last PTA board meeting, and set it on the table while she talked about the broken kiln. It’s a lot harder to vote down a $6,000 repair when you’re looking at a pot a kid made for his grandma, than when it’s just a line item on a spreadsheet.
We didn’t get everything we asked for at that budget meeting. The lacrosse team got approved, and the kiln is still sitting broken in the corner of the art room, for now. But the PTA did vote to put 15% of all spring fundraiser proceeds toward fine arts, which is enough to fix the kiln and restock the supply closet before the end of the semester. Lila’s library mural goes up next week, even if they had to mix their own green paint because they ran out of pre-made tubes. Javi brought his coil pot home last Friday, wrapped in newspaper, and said his abuela cried when he gave it to her, even unfired.
It’s not a full fix. The scoreboard still hangs shiny in the gym, and the tennis courts will probably get resurfaced this summer like they planned. But more parents are noticing the glue sticks, and the broken kiln, and the kids who only light up when they walk through the art room door. That’s enough for now, I think. We’ll show up to the next budget meeting, and the one after that, one glue stick and one coil pot at a time.
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