Help Us Celebrate Our 2020 Graduates!

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Dear Friends,

The last few months have been challenging and emotional for our beloved Burbank community. We have been overwhelmed by grief, fear, and outrage, but we also recommitted to each other, especially to those who are the future of this country – our students. As the class of 2020 moves onto the next chapter of their lives, we invite you to make a toast in their honor:

  • We salute students like Ariana, a recent John Burroughs High School graduate. She decided to address mental health with the play she wrote and produced after several students took their own lives and consequently changed how students talk about mental health in public.

  • We toast to students Nic and Carter, who studied film and theater in high school. Both will be studying film production in college at their dream schools. With an ever-growing need for new talent and more than 800,000 employees in Los Angeles County alone, the entertainment industry is an exciting career option for Nic, Carter, and many students like them.

  • We celebrate students like Jacob, Eli, Abby, Madison, Lily, Azat, NehaNina, and many others, who have been part of the robust arts community in Burbank Unified School District classrooms.

We invite you to read their stories and see the undeniable effect that arts education has had on these young people’s academic achievement, mental health, and career. Yet, this may be the last generation of our students to benefit from arts education if we do not act quickly.

As our school district faces steep budget gaps, arts education will suffer deep losses. Take music programs, for example. This fall, our school district will have to eliminate three music teachers’ positions, effectively reducing our children’s exposure to elementary music education by 60%. Countless studies prove the positive benefits of music education. It is one of the first and most rudimentary tools children use to develop their language-learning and problem-solving skills. According to PBS , “Students in elementary schools with superior music education programs scored around 22 percent higher in English and 20 percent higher in math scores on standardized tests, regardless of socioeconomic disparities among the schools or school districts.” Our children deserve more and they deserve better from us.

The devastating impact of these changes will make a generational change to public education. At a time when the social and emotional needs of ALL children are at a historic level of crisis, we will not be able to support them. The cuts are still real, they are deep, and our children stand to lose the most.

The future may be uncertain, but our children must continue to learn and thrive. We must continue investing in the future generations of creative professionals because it is through songs, dance, plays, poems, and paintings that children grieve the loss of their freedom and celebrate its return.

As we celebrate our students and their achievements, we are reminded that their success was made possible by people like you. The donation you make today will impact the youth of tomorrow. There are many difficult days ahead, but together we will get through this.

Thank you for your support,
Burbank Arts for All Foundation