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School boards should represent your community needs — so it’s important for them to hear from you. Here are some tips to help you speak up.

SCHOOL BOARD MEETINGS!

Get ready

  • Use our contact your school leaders tool to find and email your school board members.
  • Email them about the data and ask if they can add arts education to the agenda.
  • Check their website in case you need to sign in before a meeting.
  • Recruit other community members to attend with you. Learn more about engaging youth in advocacy with this flyer (in English and Spanish)!

At the school board meeting

  • Speak up! Tell a personal story about how arts education (or the lack of it) has changed your life or your student’s life.
  • Use data to reinforce your comments — it can be very powerful.
  • Be specific — what is your goal? What are you asking the board to do?
  • Hand out our LCFF Leave Behind Flyer (in English and Spanish).

After the meeting

  • Email board members with next steps or to reinforce your point

TALKING POINTS

  • Talk about the district’s LCAP and goals.
  • Research consistently shows that the arts play an integral part in the health and wellbeing of children. In particular, students are experiencing everything from obstacles to learning, increased homelessness, food shortages and increased mental health challenges as a result of this pandemic. Our students, communities and economy need to heal, and arts education is necessary to the solution.
  • Multiple research studies show arts education not only decreases feelings of anxiety, depression, and isolation, but also positively impacts all-around academic performance.
  • Students with an arts education are:
    5 times more likely to stay in school, 3 times more likely to get a bachelor’s degree, and 4 times more likely to be recognized for academic achievement.
  • Especially important during this time of trauma and upheaval, students need to develop self-management and self-discipline, interpersonal and relationship skills, and self-expression. Numerous studies show the arts support the development of all of these essential skills.
  • California’s creative economy generates 2.7 million jobs. If we do not provide students access to arts education, we sideline millions of young people soon to enter the workforce and endanger the future of the world’s fifth-largest economy.

JOIN THE

MOVEMENT TODAY