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The district will still partner with Lane Arts Council to provide all elementary schoolers with four sessions of art instruction a year from local artists, but funds will come from already-tight school site budgets.
Every year, McCornack Elementary School principal Dana Brummett books her school’s “artist in residence” from Lane Arts Council’s roster of 50 local artists.
For the upcoming school year, she scored a districtwide favorite, Kelly Thibodeaux, a fiddler and storyteller who comes to schools with a car full of tiny fiddles, teaches students basic fiddle techniques and leads students in a performance.
“He’s a legend, I’ve been trying to get him,” Brummett said. “He books up real quickly.”
The artists like Thibodeaux are commissioned through the Lane Arts Council, and they spend four, 45-minute sessions in each kindergarten to fifth-grade classroom, teaching lessons that range from silk-screen painting to African drumming and dancing, because Eugene School District 4J can’t fund full-time art teachers.
Brummett has never had to worry about the cost of the school’s artist in residence. Until this year. Now the cost will fall within schools’ own small budgets due to additional district budget constraints.
Eugene School District 4J was forced to cut $20.7 million in spending for its 2025-26 budget because of declining enrollment, the end of COVID-era federal grants and rising costs. Included in the cuts was an $80,000 contract with Lane Arts Council to provide elementary arts programming.
As principals plan for this coming school year, budget realities are beginning to reveal themselves on a school level, including the new cost of funding arts education.
Squeezing arts education into tighter budgets
Brummett uses a small budget allocated to her by the district to buy everything from the toilet paper and floor wax to copy paper and microphones.
This year, Brummett is facing a task she knows well from spending two decades in education: “Do more with less.”
She has $36,700 to spend this coming school year, which is 5% less than last year, and she will fit two new expenses in her budget: school supplies and arts programming, together costing about $8,000.
Brummett is a careful spender, but even so, her budget is tight. She leaves a cushion of money in her budget as an emergency fund, but besides that, she usually ends the year with only about $1,000 in her school account.
Even though she sees the value of arts programming, for Brummett, it’s hard to justify the responsibility of spending about 10% of her budget on an artist in residence. The money that will go toward arts programming and school supplies will take away from items like her librarian’s budget for new books that students request, unless Brummett is able to offset some of the costs with grants or parent-teacher organization (PTO) funds.
“The reality is, when our budgets are going down, we just have to figure out ways to get more creative,” Brummett said.
Equity challenges in arts education
The loss of arts education funding will affect elementary schools in the 4J district in different ways.
Brummett said other schools may be able to offset costs through PTO funds, but McCornack is ranked the third “highest needs” elementary school in the district, which means many families don’t have much money to spare for PTO fundraisers.
“We have some PTOs that have massive bank accounts,” she said, referring to elementary schools in 4J with wealthier families. “We have other PTOs that do jog-a-thons that make $5,000 a year, and that’s just not very much.”
Her PTO funds mainly support field trips and provide each teacher with $200 to spend on their classrooms every year.
The loss of district-level arts funding is a regression to how 4J elementary schools funded arts education before 2018.
After 4J stopped universally employing full-time elementary school art teachers more than 25 years ago, arts programming in 4J elementary schools was largely site-based and varied due to how schools used their budgets and their PTO funding.
Some schools decided to employ full-time art teachers from the late 1990s until 2011 with their own site money and PTO funds, according to Kelly McIver, 4J’s director of communications and intergovernmental relations, but there have been no full-time art teachers in 4J since 2011.
Lane Arts Council has provided arts programming on a school-by-school basis in 4J since the organization’s founding in 1976, according to Ben Minnis, the council’s arts education manager.
In 2018, the district started allocating money to pair with funds raised through the Lane Arts Council and Rotary Club efforts to allow all 4J elementary schools to have one artist in residence. In 2019, the funding sources were able to provide two artists in residence at each elementary school, and funding levels remained steady through the 2023-24 school year.
In 2024, the district’s funding allowed only one artist in residence at each school, and now, Lane Arts will fundraise as much as possible to make sure every elementary school can afford an artist in residence with their site budgets, Minnis said. Schools can also select artists that are less expensive, in order to minimize costs.
“We’ll just be working with schools to see what fits within their budgets,” Minnis said.
Minnis sees arts education as especially important to children’s learning and development when they are elementary-aged. He said arts education is all about keeping humans open and less inhibited to create, traits that are easiest to teach when kids are young.
“That’s when they’re most free to express themselves,” Minnis said.
Arts programming in alternative education
The Lane Arts Council serves several school districts across Lane County with its artist-in-residence program, but has seen recent increased demand from alternative education schools.
Minnis said Lane Arts is now working with hybrid charter schools, including Baker Web Academy and Silvies River Charter School, to offer in-person arts programming. The council also is getting more interest from homeschooling groups, including Cascades Homeschool Club.
This complicates Lane Arts’ mission as an arts organization that aims to serve everyone equally.
“We always want to meet students where they’re at, but I know every student that shows up in one place is taking funding from the other,” Minnis said. “I don’t have answers, just artists.”
