Today, in part because of Asawa’s lifelong advocacy, every one of SFUSD’s 20,000 elementary students has access to a credentialed art teacher, and 14,000 middle and high school students are enrolled in one or more of five disciplines: dance, drama, music, media arts, and visual art. As budgets were examined and painfully trimmed throughout the school district over the past few months, line items for the arts remained miraculously untouched. As with most miracles, there’s a reasonable explanation behind it.  

Recent state and local bonds and propositions have not only brought in significant arts funding but imposed stronger restrictions around how it is used, said Ron Machado, director of the SFUSD arts department. With the 2022 passage of Proposition 28, which dictates that 1% of California’s budget go toward the arts, the state began sending $17 million to $18 million directly to the SFUSD art department each year, much of it for hiring full-time teachers. That’s in addition to about $8 million per year in arts funding that comes from an earlier city bond measure that enshrined the Public Education Enrichment Fund through 2041. 

“We are knocking on wood, but this money is pretty strapped in for the arts,” says Machado. “People are drooling over it, but they’re realizing they can’t touch it.”