After School Arts Program, Gallery 37 To Allegedly Close
Chicago has enjoyed this thing called an artistic 'renaissance' as of late, but one of it's institutions is facing closure as CPS-run after school program Gallery 37 allegedly is facing closure after budget cuts allegedly led the Mayor's Office to discontinue the program after the current term runs out this coming June.
Described on Twitter as "an off campus Chicago Public Schools high school magnet arts program," the space has served to help bolster and house much of Chicago's burgeoning young creative community. The news 'broke' via a Wordpress post by former student Sarah Adams, who had been tipped off to the program's alleged ending this June by colleagues. Exasperated at not seeing news on the subject around the local dailies or even the internet at large, she decided to take it to the keyboard, where her story has been proliferating via social media.
In the post, Adams makes a series of strong point as to why the program, which has been deemed 'too expensive' is actually a drop in the bucket when juxtaposed against the rest of the city's finances, writing:
“Some argue that AAEP was bound to be cut because arts programs are too expensive. I’m sorry, but you know what was too expensive? DePaul’s new sports facility, paid with millions of dollars in TIFs filtered out of the school system, was too expensive. The overall cost of drop-outs on tax-payers is too expensive. Allowing the school system to be run by a self-admitted crook who robbed the school of millions was too expensive. In Ben Joravsky’s great piece in the Reader yesterday, “There’s Always Money in the Mayor’s ‘Banana Stand,’” he highlights how there always seems to be magical money that materializes out of thin air when Rahm has a pet project, or in the case of the DuSable student protesters, to get rid of an annoying problem.”
While it's yet to be seen whether or not the program has indeed been cut by the Mayor's office, it would seem to follow the trend that the city has laid out since Rahm took office back in 2011. Closing schools and shuttering community programs seems always be first on the chopping block for the former Sarah Marshall ballet dancer and this would appear to be just one furtherance of that agenda.
