New partnerships arise to sustain jazz legacy in Seattle schools

With budget cuts and belt-tightening expected soon to plug Seattle Public Schools’ $105 million deficit, nonprofits are stepping up to ensure students continue to have jazz programs inside and outside of the district.

The pledges and donations are coming as school districts across the country look for ways to make up funding shortfalls tied to the end of billions of dollars in federal COVID-19 relief aid, which flowed to districts over the past four years. At the same time, many districts are coping with drops in student enrollment, which is a major factor in determining how much money districts get from their states.

District officials say public-private partnerships might become even more important as budgets shrink.

The Friends of Washington Music, which supports music programs at Washington Middle School, is seeking private donations to cover the cost of a second full-time music teacher at the school for the 2024-25 and 2025-26 school years. The school was initially slated to lose its jazz music teacher last spring, but the position was saved after student outcry and a $50,000 donation from Grammy Award winner Quincy Jones. 

At the same time, the Onyx Fine Arts Collective, a community arts group that focuses on highlighting artists of African descent, launched a $500,000 multiyear campaign to raise money for three youth-serving music programs. The group also plans to build a statue to honor Clarence Acox, the renowned former Garfield High School jazz band director who helped put Seattle jazz education on the map.

The money from the Onyx Fine Arts Collective is not going directly to the school district, though the beneficiaries support school- and community-based music programs.

The group collected about $120,000 in donations at a February fundraiser, with roughly $75,000 of the amount set aside for educational programs. Forty-five percent of the sum is earmarked for JazzED, 35% for Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra and the remaining 20% for the Garfield Jazz Foundation, according to Robert Radford, a former Seattle Public Schools principal and the Onyx Fine Arts Collective’s treasurer. (Acox is connected to all three organizations. In addition to running the Garfield High School jazz band for nearly 50 years before retiring in 2019, he also co-founded JazzEd.)

Some of the intended recipients said the donations would go toward expanding equitable access to music instruction to children across the city by helping shore up gaps in district-provided music education classes, bringing music programs into community settings, and covering the cost of buying and repairing musical instruments and student travel to competitions and festivals.

Radford said the organization would like a significant portion of the money to be used to introduce students to music instruction, especially reading music, in their formative years in elementary school.

John Strickland, the president of the Garfield Jazz Foundation, which supports the school’s jazz program, said the money — about $15,000 in the first disbursement — would replenish the organization’s reserves. The organization pays tutors to work with middle school students to prepare them for Garfield’s jazz program and for substitutes to fill in for teachers when they travel to performances with students.

“On a purely operational level, it just means that students who couldn’t afford to take a trip to Essentially Ellington in New York or to Lionel Hampton in Idaho, we’ll be able to support them and pay for that trip,” Strickland said. “It just helps us be a more equitable organization.”

The perennial possibility that arts programs could be eliminated or cut is part of the foundation’s raison d’être, he said. 

“It’s to ensure that if there were changes in the district to budgeting that we would be able to maintain the jazz program,” he said. 

Nicole Harvey, the deputy director at Seattle JazzED, said unrestricted gifts, such as the ones from the Onyx Fine Arts Collective, may help the organizations expand partnership programs with individual schools and community groups. The program, for example, may work with elementary schools with limited music education classes to offer additional opportunities for students to participate in an after-school program or student club.

Acox co-founded Seattle JazzED with Laurie de Koch, the group’s executive director, to increase access to music programs to students across the city. It served more than 1,000 students in the Seattle area since the beginning of the current fiscal year, Harvey said.

“These funds, in particular, are going to be able to help us sustain those programs, as we continue to try to reemerge out of the COVID-19 pandemic,” she said.

The Onyx Fine Arts Collective’s fundraiser was partially a response to the proposed budget cuts at Washington Middle School last year. 

Maria Monroe-DeVita, the advocacy lead for the Friends of Washington Music, said the group sought private funding for the second music teacher position at the school as a stopgap measure “to provide a runway for us to seek longer-term, sustainable funding, preferably with public dollars.”

“At the end of the day we need to be pursuing something that’s sustainable, that’s built into the system,” Monroe DeVita said. “That’s the only way for us to ensure and protect equitable access to music and other arts education for public school students.”

The district has ruled out closing and consolidating schools as part of its deficit response for the 2024-25 school year and has said that budget cuts have been mainly confined to the central office. School-level cuts were generally one-time expenditures and related to supplies, said Art Jarvis, the deputy superintendent of academics.

That might not be the case for future years. Budget proposals for the 2025-26 year will be made public in May and might contain deeper building-level cuts.

“Certainly we’ve got major work to do for [20]25-26, and that would impact the buildings if, in fact, we can’t find the tools to right-size the district,” Jarvis said.

Art supporters say music and art classes are often among the first to go when districts tighten their belts. But, they argue, students learn important skills in those programs.

“I am concerned that there would not be an emphasis and priority put on art programs and music programs,” said Earnest Thomas, a retired Boeing engineer, artist and the Onyx Fine Arts Collective’s president. “My view is that there should be because the concentration one spends learning music can be utilized in every walk of life. Reading music and doing mathematics are almost synonymous with each other.”

Jarvis said the district recognizes the long history and community support for jazz education programs.

“The door is open to more public-private partnerships than it probably has been over the last 50 years,” he said. “And, in this case, one of the true treasures of the city of Seattle is the legacy that’s there in terms of jazz — in terms of jazz musicians and bands. We will do everything possible to support that.”

The Onyx Fine Arts Collective also approached the district about erecting the Acox statue on the Garfield High School grounds, but, so far, the district has demurred.

While the district does not have a policy on putting statues on school property, Jarvis said doing so for one individual could be seen as endorsing everything that that person has done. The district, he said, does not want to be put in that position.