Dive Brief:
- New York City is allotting an additional $23 million for arts education in the city.
- The money will be used to add 120 new art teachers to NYC schools and to rehabilitate art facilities in over a dozen buildings, according to Mayor Bill de Blasio, Comptroller Scott Stringer, and Schools Chancellor Carmen Farina, who made the announcement Tuesday.
- The City Council approved this money last week with its fiscal 2015 budget.
Dive Insight:
In April, Comptroller Scott Stringer released a report detailing quantifiable stats on the decreasing number of New York public schools offering arts education. At the time, Stringer said supplying a full-time, certified arts teacher to every school that doesn’t have one would cost about $26 million. It looks like NYC is going to come pretty close with this $23 million.
Not only is this wonderful for the schools that are going to be affected positively by the money and the new arts teachers, but it says something about political efficiency. To see the report go from a paper in April to a solution in July is incredible and unfortunately something we don't see all too often.