This story is published as part of the Baltimore News Collaborative, a project exploring the challenges and successes experienced by young people in Baltimore. The collaborative is supported by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. News members of the collaborative retain full editorial control.

The arts are not a luxury.

To the contrary, arts education is vital to education itself. There is a body of research that makes this case unambiguously. Consider a 2022 study by Daniel H. Bowen, an assistant professor at Texas A&M University, and Brian Kisida, an assistant professor at the University of Missouri. In their research of over 10,000 students at 42 schools, they found that exposure to arts education led to fewer disciplinary infractions, greater engagement in school, improved emotional and cognitive empathy, and increased college aspirations.

But no academic treatise will ever be quite as compelling on the importance of an arts education as, say, Selyna Williams, a senior at Mergenthaler Vocational Technical High School. “I never was like, ‘Oh, I want to be an artist or anything like that.’” she told The Baltimore Banner. “I didn’t think I was capable of doing anything that good.”

Nor will any study ever be quite as persuasive as Jefferson, a fifth grader at Abbottson Elementary School. “I remember when I was 6, I thought I was useless,” the young violinist told WYPR Radio, “but when I started playing this thing, I felt actually useful.”

“I didn’t think I was capable…”

“I thought I was useless…”

And then they found the arts.

For Selyna, it was her fourth-place finish in the ninth annual Courting Art Baltimore competition, which awards scholarships to high school students, a total of $20,500 to seven kids this year alone. The competition also offers wall space — exhibition at the Eastside District Court Building, bringing a splash of color and vibrancy to institutional corridors that usually bear witness only to traffic disputes and landlord/tenant battles.

Jefferson, on the other hand, can trace the fact that he no longer feels “useless” to a music program started largely out of pocket by two educators who were fed up with the lack of instrumental music education at their school. “I bought a lot of stuff randomly,” music teacher Ariel Wirsching told WYPR, “cheap little instruments from Target back in the day, anything and everything to put something in that room”

Ideally, the voyages of self-discovery made by Jefferson and Selyna would be unremarkable, the norm in a system that, by design, enabled young people to identify and explore the full range of their interests and talents.

Unfortunately, we don’t have such a system. Indeed, were it not for the inventiveness of the retired judge who founded Courting Art Baltimore and the scrappy determination of Wirsching and her former principal who scrounged for musical instruments, Selyna and Jefferson might never have found their artistry.

And that would be a loss.

So one hopes voters will keep in mind the criticality of arts education as they ponder their response to drastic budget cutbacks to the National Endowment for the Arts and the Department of Education. One hopes they will give serious consideration to the question of what we can and cannot afford as defense spending soars and ICE is awarded more money than it knows what to do with and America just saw a military parade roll through Washington at a reported cost of up to $45 million.

One hopes the electorate will think of children like Selyna and Jefferson, young people struggling to come of age in an era that is conspicuously, even performatively, mean of spirit and short of sight. One hopes those voters will understand that the arts do not just uplift and ennoble us, are not simply a means of explaining ourselves to ourselves — although if they were only that, that would be plenty — but that they also are a means of success, a way up and out for young people living in limited spaces by limited means.

Americans for the Arts, a 65-year-old nonprofit organization with a mission to support the arts and arts education, would like us to know that low-income students who are “highly engaged” in the arts are twice as likely to graduate from college as their peers. And students of low socioeconomic status who are heavily involved in the arts drop out at a rate five times lower than other kids who share their socioeconomic challenges.

Take it as a spur to demand a government of thoughtful priorities that will do right by our children. Because it bears repeating: The arts are not a luxury.

Of course, military parades are another matter.

Leonard Pitts Jr. is a former Miami Herald columnist whose twice‑weekly, nationally syndicated column appeared in over 200 newspapers and earned him the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in Commentary. Also an award-winning radio documentary writer and producer, he currently serves as director at Morgan State University’s School of Global Journalism & Communication.