In 2017, Marissa Ontiveros, a newly minted NYU grad with a minor in educational theater, applied to several community-based cultural organizations to be a teaching artist in the city's public schools. Soon she had all the jobs she could handle. “I was working at five organizations in early 2020 teaching theater, movement and different art pieces,” she said about making a living in her field right out of college — a stroke of good fortune that would be almost entirely undone by COVID-19. She was part of the fallout from the profound blow to arts education funding that was caused by the pandemic, and from which students and their teachers are still struggling to recover.

The Department of Education’s arts budget was $21.5 million in the last school year. The line item pays cultural organizations that find and pay artists to go into classrooms and teach kids how to dance, act, sing, paint, write, and learn all kinds of other creative skills. The arrangement works pretty well because New York City has two things in abundance: public school students and artists with both creative expertise and rent coming due.

So business was booming for Ontiveros and the rest of the city’s 4,500 teaching artists. Then Covid struck.

In April, Ontiveros went from a 30-hour work week to a single offer to lead a virtual two-hour class. She accepted because what else could she do? Then that offer fell through. “They were like, "it doesn't seem like those hours are there,” Ontiveros said. “Check in next semester." Cultural organizations, including her employers, were regrouping. Replicating in-class arts instruction online was a struggle. And students, along with their parents, were coming to grips with the reality that fun stuff like putting on plays and taking field trips to museums would now be replaced by staring at screens.

The situation grew vastly worse in June, when the city cut the Department of Education's arts budget by 70 percent. Teaching artists took the brunt of it, no matter how experienced they might’ve been. “I know people who’ve been doing this 10 to 15 years, who got laid off the same day I did,” Ontiveros said, adding that several gave up on New York and moved away. “When the money’s not there, there’s not much you can do.”

But Ontiveros stayed. She survived through the summer on unemployment and her government stimulus check. But then came September and there was still barely any work. She applied for a $1,000 emergency grant from a non-profit group called the New York City Arts in Education Roundtable and, lo and behold, she got it. “That was in the midst of needing money to buy groceries,” she recalled. “So that kind of income with no strings attached, really meant a lot.”

The Roundtable is a civic group that advocates for teaching artists and arts education administrators citywide. Executive director Kimberly Olsen said more than 800 teaching artists applied to the relief fund after their work dried up and incomes plummeted. “The teaching artists in our schools have been the hardest hit as a result of these budget cuts,” Olsen said.

A Roundtable survey of emergency fund applicants revealed that almost 80 percent of them had been furloughed or laid off, and only 20 percent had work confirmed in the next three months. But Olsen said most of these teaching artists were not giving up on the profession. “Over 95 percent said they wanted to continue in the field of arts education,” she said.

But how? The entirety of the $330,000 fund — raised from private foundations like the New York Community Trust and Booth-Ferris Foundation — has been disbursed. And the cultural groups that put artists in the schools have lost much of the city revenue they relied on.

One of those groups is the Community Word Project, which teaches writing and English as a new language to kindergarten and first grade students in poor neighborhoods. Founder Michele Kotler said the budget cuts were the worst she’s seen since founding the group in 1997. “We ourselves were reduced by over $93,000,” she said. Although that has meant a sharp reduction in programming, Kotler said she and her organization were determined to hang on.

“I grew up in New York City in the 1970s and the year that I started public school was the year that they cut arts in education,” she recalled. “As a young person who learned differently, I suffered from not having creative learning as part of my public school education.” That’s why the current cuts seem ominous to her. “I'm afraid that we're going back to that time again.”

Kotler and others in the field noted a special irony in public school students losing teaching artists at the moment they most need help processing and creatively responding to the pandemic. Kimberly Olsen of the Arts in Education Roundtable said, “Teaching artists are able to go in the classroom and use their art as a means of teaching a different subject or doing conflict resolution, of building social and emotional learning skills, and as a means of community building.”

Marissa Ontiveros says she's taken to teaching a private, in-person pod of 5-year-olds. Her pre-existing lung condition makes it risky, but she needs the money. And despite the hardship for this class of instructors, there's no guarantee that the Department of Education will see the bulk of its arts funding restored in the next school year. That won’t be for lack of lobbying campaign by cultural groups who recently sent an open letter to Mayor Bill de Blasio and Department of Cultural Affairs Commissioner Gonzalo Casals, calling on them to reverse the cuts.

As for Ontiveros, she says she's still holding onto her vision of post-pandemic normalcy: “To get back to work and art and joy and all those good things.”