If you know me, it is probably through your kid or through your aging parent. I work as an artist educator to bring creative movement experiences to classrooms, community centers, libraries and senior centers around the Island of Martha’s Vineyard.

Every day, I am lucky enough to see the transformative power of moment. I feel proud to be a young woman dedicated to, through movement education, fostering in youth and adults an understanding of how to work cooperatively, how to solve problems creatively, how to learn to watch and respect the creative voices of others, how to appreciate their own beautiful and challenging bodies, and how to discover their own powerful creative potential......to name a spare few.

According to Americans for the Arts, the nonprofit arts industry generates $22.3 billion in federal, state and local tax revenues annually; a yield well beyond their collective $4 billion in arts allocations, which is why the Trump administration’s undermining of support for the arts for “economic reasons” seems based on alternative facts. In a creative movement classroom, I work to facilitate the expression, problem solving, and choice making of the students, rather than dictating to them the way to make their dances. Through this sort of education, we train our children to know their own voices and encourage them to be thinkers, solvers and discerning questioners. In other words, we train them to be democratic citizens with lives that matter: the kind of citizens who question authority, demand to be heard and refuse to be abused.

Our schools need more arts education. Schools, especially those struggling, can retain their best teachers by becoming incubators for creativity and innovation; places where students want to learn and teachers want to teach. Students with an education rich in the arts have better grade point averages, score better on standardized tests in reading and math, and have lower dropout rates; findings that cut across all socio-economic categories.

Congress and state education leaders should support strong arts education programs in order for local school leaders to include the arts in all disciplines (dance, theater, music, visual and media arts) in their curriculum. Our rural communities contain some of the greatest cultural assets of our country. The robust cohort of “Island grown” and “Island home” artists on MV proves that, and we must continue to foster the arts in other rural schools and communities nationwide. Please join me in encouraging politicians to not only keep and maintain the NEA, but expand and promote it, and please join me in celebrating the Island’s youth, adults and aging seniors through joyous dance together.

Leah Crosby
Chilmark