O n Jan. 23, many Lowell students went to a San Francisco Unified School District school board hearing to speak against Proposal 6145: Extracurricular and Co-curricular Activities. An amendment made to the original proposal would ban ticket sales for student performances, excluding sporting events.
The goal of the school board’s proposal is to make sure “all students have equitable access to educational extracurricular and cocurricular activities,” according to the school board. The Lowell emailed the board for a comment regarding the reason behind excluding sporting events from the proposal, but they declined to comment.
Although non-extracurricular arts programs receive extra support from the Public Education Enrichment Fund, that funding does not cover plays and musicals because they are extracurricular activities, Jones said. “Without this funding, these [extracurricular] programs will no longer exist, [and] without these programs, many students including myself could not afford to take theater or dance anywhere else,” junior dancer and advanced theater student Bel Mehaffy said to the board.
Students and staff found out about Proposal 6145 on the morning of the school board meeting, when SOTA’s principal Barnaby Payne contacted principal Andrew Ishibashi, according to drama teacher Anne Marie Ullman. Ishibashi informed Ullman about the proposal and the board meeting, and she then told other Lowell arts teachers and her own students. Ullman and Jones encouraged their students to attend the meeting that night, and had their advanced classes write speeches during class time.
Later, during the board meeting, students were allotted 25 minutes of speaking time for Proposal 6145. Within that span of time, students stood up to share how school performing arts programs had shaped their lives, fostered invaluable social skills, created tight-knit communities, helped them cope with loss and gave them an opportunity to perform when they couldn’t otherwise have afforded it. “I think it is inequitable to take these programs away from students like myself,” Mehaffy said.
While the school board claims that the proposed idea of not charging for tickets is equitable, lower-income students would lose the opportunity to participate in arts programs, according to Ullman. “The students who can afford to will go to outside organizations that charge for the arts, and students who can’t will be left with nothing,” Ullman said. “We would be 100 percent behind [the proposal] if [the school board] would agree to fund our programming so that we don’t have to charge tickets.”
Ultimately, a decision on the proposal was postponed until the next SFUSD school board meeting. Between now and then, the school board will perform a fiscal analysis on the impact of Proposal 6145.
The meeting is on Tuesday Feb. 13 at 6 p.m. at 555 Franklin St.