Should band programs have to fundraise?

This is a complicated question, but for the sake of argument I'm going to provide a simple answer: Yes.

Honestly I think that it is necessary to look at the larger scope of this issue. In any society, we have to decide how to allocate our resources. We get taxed and we spend our tax money on a LOT of different things. One of them is public education which, hopefully, we keep as well-funded as it possibly needs to be.

But how well-funded does it need to be?

To answer that question we need to ask about the purpose of public education in general. What is its responsibility to our children? What must they learn there? Why are we sending them there in the first place? Theoretically, if we could answer these questions definitively, we could arrive at a core group of things that should exist in public education- each of them funded to the maximum amount possible as to make schools as effective as they can be.

I don't think that this post is the proper venue to try and answer these questions in detail. But when I do think about these things, I am often conflicted as to how a BOCJ program fits into the model I create.

I feel strongly as though I could stand up and defend music education in general. I feel that intuitive, valid, research-based arguments can be made to defend music's place in public education. But these arguments are harder to make the farther you get from "music" in general. For example, it is much harder to defend the necessity of football than it is to defend the necessity of physical education. An analogy could be made to any specific iteration of a field.

So I end up saying that music should be funded. Schools should have music programs. But a BOCJ program that only affects 30% of the students? A program that due to its inherent structure has limitations on the amount and types of skills and content that can be taught to its members? A program like this should be funded like any other group that fits those descriptions- as an extra-curricular aided by fundraising. Parents and students should be able to petition and demand a band program just as they would anything else, and in an ideal world schools should have discretionary budgets that help to meet those programs halfway, but funding any extra-curricular/special area fully from the start is to say that the money can't be spent in a better way- and I simply have a hard time believing that.