Yonkers Schools Start Year without Art, Music and More

The city government in Yonkers, just north of New York City, couldn’t figure out how to plug a $50 million budget gap as the school year approached. They finally balanced things by getting rid of over 500 teachers. The “teach-to-the-test” crowd and the “readin’, ‘ritin’ an’ ‘rithmetic” fundamentalists kept control of the process, and now, there will be no music nor art taught to those in junior and senior high school in Yonkers. While the result may produce high school graduates who are literate and numerate, they may well remain the barbarians that most adolescents are.

In Yonkers, the city government chose not to cut the police nor the fire departments. That choice is pretty sane, one can’t educate a population that isn’t safe. However, the mayor’s proposal for a 15% property tax hike to cover the short fall failed to generate the support needed to go anywhere. That was one likely solution, particularly since Yonkers has had an 11% drop in property taxes since the 1993-1994 school year. And the counties of Westchester, Putnam and Rockland have all raised taxes in recent years to cover school costs.

Instead, Yonkers officials decided to get the state to bail them out, as they did last year. As the saying goes, that was then and this is now. Yonkers didn’t get the state aid it expected. So, no music at the high schools, no art at the junior high schools, and there are cuts to foreign languages, junior varsity sports, drama clubs and even student newspapers.

America’s second president, John Adams, said, “I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.” He believed that the arts were the crowning achievements of a civilization, resting upon everything else.

The kids in Yonkers have just been told that the arts are expendable. No one argues that the three Rs don’t matter (although one might feel better about it if more than one of them actually began with the letter “R”). However, there are other “Rs” that deserve the attention of any nation that counts itself civilized – Rembrandt, Rachmaninoff and Reasoning. It is a bitter lesson for the young to learn that those in charge don’t know what they are doing.


© Copyright 2004 by The Kensington Review, J. Myhre, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent.


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