Budget cuts to ‘crucial’ school arts program to be felt across N.S.

CITYnews halifax / By Steve Gow

Thousands of students in Nova Scotia will be feeling the impact as a 20-year-old arts program in schools will not be able to carry on without funding.

The Artists in the Schools program is about to disappear after its provincial funding was among the cuts to the Department of Education and the 30 per cent slash in operating grants to Nova Scotia arts organizations.

The defunding will be felt among students province-wide, as arts agencies that share the money to bring painters, dancers and other artists into schools to enrich arts education and provide insights into career options will no longer be able to maintain the program.

Oriana Duinker, executive director of the Writers Federation of Nova Scotia (WFNS), is calling the loss “devastating.”

As part of the program, the Writers Federation coordinates bringing Nova Scotian authors into elementary and secondary schools to deliver presentations, workshops, and readings for students of all grades.

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“Arts programming has already been slashed in schools for so long that this subsidized, extra programming that we could bring in was crucial to supplementing curriculum,” she says, noting the annual provincial investment for the WFNS portion of the program was only $65,000. “Now it’s gone too.”

She says while the cuts will be felt in every region of Nova Scotia, it will be rural schools impacted the most since they don’t have easy access to such resources in those communities.

However, Duinker also notes that the elimination of such a program will shake Nova Scotia’s arts community at large.

“That entire fabric is just going to be so deeply affected by these cuts,” she says. “It’s not just a small group of artists that won’t be able to make art. It’s going to affect literally everyone in this province.”

In addition to the cuts to the Artists in the Schools program, Duinker says her organization was also hit directly by the budget cuts.

WFNS has long been supported by the province through an annual operational grant, but that operational support will now be reduced by 20 per cent starting in April.

“We’re still doing a lot of kind of scrambling to figure out where, in our already very tight budget, that’s going to impact things,” says Duinker.

Duinker is calling on Nova Scotians to contact their MLA and ask for a reversal of the cuts to arts organizations, ahead of a rally that is scheduled to take place at Province House in Halifax at noon on Wednesday.