Kathy Tran
Audio By Carbonatix
Once again, the Texas legislature is in session to hash out another budget, and some curious amendments have popped up that aim to bring one entire department down to zero.
Six amendments filed between Sunday afternoon and Monday morning call for either the elimination or reassigning of funding and grant money for the Texas Commission on the Arts, according to legislative records.
The proposed budget currently being debated in the Texas House in Austin sets aside more than $15.7 million, but the pre-filed amendments by Rep. Bryan Slaton (R-Greenville) and Rep. Briscoe Cain (R-Deer Park) would either remove or reallocate those funds to departments such as veterans’ affairs, the Texas Education Agency or the Texas Health and Human Services’ Alternatives to Abortion program.
Joanna St. Angelo, the executive director of the Sammons Center for the Arts and president of the Dallas Area Cultural Advocacy Coalition, saw the amendments shortly after they were introduced earlier in the week and alerted followers, urging them to call their representatives about the proposals.
“This is ridiculous and hurtful,” St. Angelo tells the Observer. “It’s taking money away from an industry that’s already suffered greatly during the pandemic to generate billions for the Texas economy and employ thousands of people.”
St. Angelo says the funding elimination would affect not just theaters and symphonies but almost every vital industry and social service by eliminating the state’s grants, jobs and budgets in arts programs. Zeroing out the arts budget would also eliminate federal funding for the arts in Texas since it won’t be able to match the funds provided by the National Endowment for the Arts.
“It’s very important to the citizens of Texas as a quality of life issue,” St. Angelo says. “It helps feed the restaurant and hotel industry and it’s just very shortsighted. Education is the other part. The arts and music education has been drastically reduced, and independent arts organizations are having to pick up the slack.”
Art and music education are vital for states that want to encourage students not just to stay in school but to continue pursuing a higher education after they graduate. A new book from Penguin Random House called Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transforms Us, written by Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine’s Susan Magsamen and Google Vice President of Design Ivy Ross, describes arts and music programs as more than just a luxury to be enjoyed passively by audience members or as a distraction from other education programs by students. Ross told NPR’s All Things Considered that, “Creativity is making new connections, new synapses” in developing minds by increasing the brain’s plasticity and ability to adapt to new experiences.
“The arts and music education has been drastically reduced, and independent arts organizations are having to pick up the slack.” – Joanna St. Angelo, president of the Dallas Area Cultural Advocacy Coalition
“Children who engage in the arts are better learners,” Ross told NPR. “Students with access to art education are five times less likely to drop out of school and four times more likely to be recognized with high achievement.”
St. Angelo concurs with those assertions.
“Kids who are exposed to arts in schools tend to not drop out as much and go to college,” St. Angelo says. “For kids who don’t do sports, the arts keeps them in schools.”
Arts funding in Texas, however, is at one of its lowest levels in the country. According to the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, Texas ranks 47th in funding for the arts in its 2023 fiscal year budget, with a per capita spending rate of just 34 cents.
Some of Slaton and Cain’s amendments aim to allocate arts spending toward programs that help veterans, but St. Angelo noted that eliminating that funding would also eliminate arts programs that help former soldiers deal with PTSD. It’s something St. Angelo says she knows personally because her husband is a veteran who uses an art program for his condition.
“I’m married to a Vietnam vet who is disabled and has PTSD,” she says. “I can tell you he has anxiety and has things that set him off, and listening to music is one way to deal with that, but there are much more proactive things with music and writing that he can do because writing allows veterans to write about the things they can’t talk about.”
St. Angelo says arts funding represents a fraction of the state’s budget, and its elimination won’t solve the state’s spending issues. But it would make life worse for the people who depend on the arts to enrich or improve their lives.
“This hurts everybody,” St. Angelo says. “This doesn’t just hurt arts in big cities.”
