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PUBLIC TESTIMONY
Testimony by Sami Abu Shumays, Deputy Director of Flushing Town Hall, on Arts Education Equity
5:18:52
ยท
3 min
Sami Abu Shumays, Deputy Director of Flushing Town Hall, testified on the importance of cultural diversity in arts education and the role of cultural institutions in providing these programs to NYC schools. He emphasized the need for equitable representation of various art forms and cultures in education, and highlighted the financial challenges faced by cultural institutions.
- Stressed the importance of including diverse cultural art forms in education, beyond Western classical traditions
- Described Flushing Town Hall's CASA programs offering various cultural dance, music, and art forms
- Addressed the need for continued funding of cultural institutions, mentioning a potential 53% budget cut and calling for $75 million in baseline funding
- Supported $41 million in arts education funding and called for enforcing transparency in the Department of Cultural Affairs
Sami Abu Shumays
5:18:52
Thank you, committee chairs and counsel, for sticking through this very long hearing.
5:18:59
My name is Samuel Bouchemaz, and I'm deputy director at Flushing Town Hall, one of the small SIGs and a steering committee member of both the Latinx Arts Consortium of New York and the Cultural Equity Coalition of New York.
5:19:11
Flushing Town Hall serves Queens and all of New York City with extraordinarily diverse culturally relevant programs including music, dance, visual arts, and theater programs, arts educational programs for students and senior citizens, and regrants and professional development programs for artists and small organizations in Queens.
5:19:30
We are a DOE contractor serving around 15,000 students annually.
5:19:36
Social impact of the arts has been well documented, but I'd like to offer a perspective that I haven't heard anyone say in this room so far in this hearing, which is that equity is more than just about making sure that everybody has equal access to the arts.
5:19:52
It is also a question of which arts and cultural forms people have access to, especially young people.
5:20:00
Arts education offerings in the DOE should reflect the rich tapestry that is New York City.
5:20:05
Forms like western classical music, ballet, and fine arts have been rightly celebrated.
5:20:10
But, for example, so too should other classical and folk art forms such as Chinese opera, Indian katak dance, Korean Minwa painting be celebrated in our schools, as well as other art forms that have been passed down through generations.
5:20:24
Whether our students come from households that play salsa or chopin, they should know that their arts are valued and uplifted as much as their neighbors.
5:20:33
They should understand that their creative spark and their cultural heritage matters.
5:20:38
When we uplift the arts and cultural forms produced by people from around the globe, it can be a transformative experience, building stronger community as well as spreading the benefits of the arts and culture more justly.
5:20:51
Representation is important, not just in our faces, but in our languages, musics, dances, cuisines, religions, and social forms.
5:21:00
The message to our children is that they have value.
5:21:03
Their voice matters.
5:21:04
Their participation in school matters.
5:21:06
Their participation in our city matters.
5:21:10
At Flushing Town Hall, we've always insisted on this type of inclusive representation.
5:21:15
And like many of our fellow cultural institutions, we are able to provide arts education programs to New York City schools that do include diverse cultural forms, which otherwise would not be available if it weren't for outside institutions like ours.
5:21:27
Some of our CASA programs in 2025 include traditional Mexican dance, Korean dance, music and painting, Colombian music and dance, West African dance and drumming.
5:21:37
We have master teaching artists on our roster offering additional things like Mexican paper arts, native American history and culture, Caribbean drumming, etcetera, just to name a few.
5:21:49
This is one reason among many that cultural institutions are a necessary partner of the DOE and need to be funded in order to survive and continue to provide our services.
5:21:58
I'll just quickly summarize.
5:22:00
We're facing a 53% cut in the mayor's budget.
5:22:03
We're gonna be decimated unless you all baseline and add 75,000,000.
5:22:08
I'm also very supportive of the $41,000,000 in arts education funding.
5:22:13
It all starts with the arts.
5:22:15
And one last thing, I really appreciate you calling for transparency and really pressing the administration on transparency in all these ways.
5:22:24
And I'll note that the bill passed three years ago, November, calling for transparency at the Department of Cultural Affairs, but I've yet to see the enforcement of that bill.
5:22:33
We've yet to see the Department of Cultural Affairs report transparently, but the city council passed that bill already.
5:22:39
So with all your calls for transparency, I hope that there's some enforcement.