Principal Lisa Kaplan addresses students at Jackson Elementary.

This afternoon, students in South Philadelphia’s Jackson Elementary School celebrated the completion of a 5,000-square-foot mosaic completed with help from COSACOSA Art At Large, a nonprofit organization, and support from Công dân cho Trẻ em và Thanh niên.

Leveraging outside programs like this one to enrich students’ experience has been a key strategy for Principal Lisa Kaplan. But she isn’t sure how she could possibly pull off something like this again next year.

After all, unless state and city funding comes through in a hurry, she’s losing her office manager, her secretary, guidance counselors, arts and music teachers, noontime aides and, in fact, every single person besides herself that is not a classroom instructor. “It’s pretty decimating, I have to be honest with you, and frightening. How am I supposed to continue to run a school? How am I going to continue all the programs that we have brought into the school in the last few years? I don’t know how I’m going to do it.”

Kapan lost her school nurse last year, and has to manage without. But now, “With all of the cuts, everyone will be in a classroom. There will be nobody out to do anything but myself. I’m good, but I’m not that good.”

Her school will have no after-school programs next year, and it will have larger class sizes, since a number of teachers received force-transfer notices. She notes that Jackson had its first and last choral and instrumental music concert this year — the newly created instrumental program will have no teacher going forward. And the school’s “rock band, whose name is Home, will now be homeless, since they practice after school”

Kim Niemela of COSACOSA worked with seventh and eighth grade students on the mosaic, part of a five-year effort to wrap the exterior of the school in mosaic murals as part of a grant program called the Picasso Project. The mosaic was designed by students who participated in an art and biology curriculum. She says the organization works with six schools at a time and has been doing so for 23 years. But she said she’s been told a number of the schools she works with may not be able to coordinate such programs going forward. “Powel [Elementary] has said if they’re stripped the way the district has planned it now, of their administrative staff, they will not be able to manage projects like this.”

Philadelphia City Paper – June 14, 2013 – Đọc bài báo trực tuyến