This is a non-sports post, but a Rochester one.
The school district I grew up in is facing a dire budget crisis in every school. All schools and most departments have been given unrealistic budget figures for the next school year, and are looking at the massive reduction in educational services to meet those figures.
My high school alma mater, School of the Arts, is gaining a lot of publicity for its fight against these budget reductions. In an article in today’s Democrat and Chronicle, they claim that approximately half of their arts funding will need to be cut, as well as reductions in the AP and honors courses that they honor.
I attended the school from 1994-2000, from 7th-12th grade. I initially applied as a dance major, but my vaulters physique (square and broad shouldered) and my disintegrating knees quickly led me to creative writing. But the school did much more than teach me how to write with grace, but challenged me academically and taught me the social graces blue-collar teenaged me was sorely lacking (look people in the eye when you speak, dress appropriately, when hobnobbing with your much more gifted, educated and wealthy classmates and their families, don’t let on that your dad was laid off again and doesn’t own a car.)
So to hear that the school that taught me so much and made me the successful person I am today could lose the core of what makes it special is heartbreaking. But despite the Facebook invites and pleas to stop the cuts and “save our SOTA,” I can’t lend my voice solely to the cause.
My little brother – the one who was born a month after I started my first year at SOTA, the little baby and toddler I would proudly carry around the school on Open House nights – is a sophomore at East High School. He didn’t get into SOTA, though he applied and had two sisters as alumna. He has some problems with learning, difficulty with test anxiety, problems with reading comprehension. He is still an incredibly bright student, a polite and caring person, and possesses the same Canadian biting sense of humor that runs in our family. He was blessed to be in a special program at East that finally got him on track academically and made college a possibility – when my parents were told that it wasn’t years before.
That program, Rochester Matters, was cut last year.
My little brother is still working hard, still at East, and still wants to go to college. But his school faces massive cuts too, ones that will devastate the 1714 students that attend the school, who are mostly from homes around the poverty level in some of Rochester’s worst areas. They are cuts to programs that provide vocational training, that help decrease class size, honors classes, remedial classes, classes for those with borderline learning disabilities.
Besides my little brother, my mom, aunt, cousin, and best friend’s mother all work in the district, and see first hand how budget cuts affect students everyday. My mom, a elementary lunch lady since 1988, serves most of her students their only meal of the day. She knows this because they tell her so. My aunt, a school secretary, has had to deal with students and parents from her school being murdered.
You then understand why I can’t fight just for my alma mater, a relatively small school that serves a relatively well-off population in regards to the other high schools in the area. Everyone is facing unfair cuts. And my dog in this fight is my little brother. I may have been picked as “Most Political” and “Most Likely to Plan Our Class Reunions” when I graduated from SOTA in 2000, but I can’t pick SOTA over the other schools that are working with some of the most underprivileged in the city. I do hope SOTA gets their funding restored, but I hope East, #52, Franklin and others do too.
I worry that my stance – and putting said stance out here publicly, something I’ve debated for weeks – will alienate me from the teachers that made me who I am today. But I can’t partition off one issue from the much larger issue. And sometimes, you have to side with your family. I want my brother to go to college, and my family and friends to keep their jobs.
