With more than $3 billion in Proposition 28 funds distributed since 2023, school districts across California have hired hundreds more for visual arts, music, dance and theater classes in schools.
But smaller, rural school districts — which represent about a third of all districts in California — say Prop. 28’s annual $1 billion windfall has highlighted persistent challenges in expanding arts education. New positions remain unfilled, and without clear guidance from state officials, rural school officials are looking for creative solutions to grow arts offerings in their communities.
“So many of our districts are single school districts, and when your principal is also the superintendent and the bus driver and the lunch lady, there’s no way to also spend your time tracking down how to make your Prop. 28 money work more for you,” said Noelle Chandler, an arts program specialist for the Merced County Office of Education.
In 2019, just 11% of rural high schools offered courses in all four arts disciplines — visual arts, music, dance and theater, according to researchers at SRI, or Stanford Research International. Researchers estimated that California would need 5,500 additional arts teachers to meet demand for arts education.
Rural schools also have less arts leadership support. A 2025 report by researchers at nonprofit SRI found that only 25% of rural schools received district-level arts leadership and program support to expand the arts, compared with 58% of schools overall in California.
In Merced County, for example, most districts in the Central Valley county struggled to spend new Prop. 28 funds because they had no dedicated arts administrator who brings expertise and focus on arts expansion, Chandler said.
The biggest issue among the 21 school districts in Merced County has been the shortage of credentialed arts educators to fill positions, and it took the county’s largest school district, Merced City School District, over three years to find itinerant art and music teachers, Chandler said.
Eric Engdahl, chair of the department of teacher education for dance and theater at Cal State East Bay, said most rural schools now have the funds to invest in arts programs, but they are still stuck in “credential deserts,” or areas without access to arts teacher preparation programs.
“They don’t have that (teacher) pipeline, and if you’re a small rural school district, you don’t necessarily have enough money to pay for full-time salaries,” Engdahl said.
Schools in Merced County have, in part, relied on arts instruction provided by noncredentialed teachers, including through ARTREE, a decades-old county program that recruits teaching artists from the community to provide workshops in dance, drama, music and literary and visual arts in schools.
“There’s always been this understanding that our students deserve exposure to arts as much as humanly possible. The question is always, how do we afford it?” Chandler said. “Prop. 28 has proven that this is not only affordable, but something that we are required to invest in.”
But the law’s implementation also caused widespread confusion in the county, Chandler said.
Many district administrators misunderstood the funds as one-time grants and tried “as hard as possible to hoard it” for future expenses, she said. Some felt the law was a mandate to “change everything from the ground up,” as they relied on community partnerships for arts programs that may not have been eligible for the use of Prop 28 funds.
Prop. 28 is a chance to revive many arts programs, but without a teacher pipeline, changes in staff or administration also often dictate whether a program sticks.
After a longtime choir director retired at Los Banos Unified, which serves about 10,000 students across 17 schools, students lost access to choir programming for two years, Chandler said. When the district found a new director, participation in choir “came back less than a tenth of what it had been” before.
“It’s not that the arts were never here,” Chandler said. “But choices were made, an arts program somewhere was shut down, and as a result, now it’s not just building; it’s rebuilding.”
A new law could move the needle
Jennifer Spangler, arts education coordinator for Butte County Office of Education, said schools in Butte County have doubled the number of arts teachers since the passing of Prop. 28. She added that multiple districts in the county were also spending Prop. 28 funds on programs like computer science and culinary arts, because the original law allowed funding for courses that facilitate “creative expression.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom in August signed into law Assembly Bill 2440, which provides new guidance around spending and defines the four arts disciplines through new arts standards. Spangler said the new law, which goes into effect on Jan. 1, has spurred across schools “a revision of what they’re funding with Prop. 28” in rural schools, including new priorities for dance and theater.
“This is the first time (administrators) are starting to understand and become a little more informed about what an arts education program is,” Spangler said.
The new law also allows smaller districts to pool Prop. 28 funds to hire itinerant instructors and waive certain requirements around hiring full-time arts instructors.
Engdahl said the law “will definitely help to understand how to use the money more effectively,” but it still does not solve the problem of added “administrative time” and “where to find an arts teacher.”
Arts education that is ‘rooted’ in rural communities
For Spangler, priority for arts education comes from the top down.
She said the California Department of Education needs to create a dedicated plan for rural schools, which could include a grant program that helps pay tuition for arts teacher candidates committed to teaching in rural schools. She also criticized the lack of funding to help county offices teach district administrators how to abide by new arts standards.
Rural school districts also need more help finding ways to “look in their own community for artists,” Engdahl said, especially with additional funding that can supplement Prop. 28-backed programs or allow schools to use noncredentialed teaching artists from within the community.
Many schools in Merced County, for example, have used a combination of Prop. 28 and other funds like the Expanded Learning Opportunities Program to support cultural arts like mariachi and Baile Folklorico, Chandler said. In Colusa County, one school created a full-time position for a local music instructor using career technical education funds, and other rural schools across the state used Title IV and Title I funds to round out salaries for cultural programs like tribal arts, Engdahl said.
Credential deserts will take time and investment to transform, Engdahl said, but these are small ways to make sure that rural schools do not get left behind in the waiting process.
“The spirit of arts education in California should be rooted in the communities of students that are served,” Engdahl said.