The San Diego Unified School District’s Board of Education voted unanimously to restore full funding — about $1.5 million — to arts education programs for the upcoming 2011-12 school year during its budget meeting on June 21. An unlikely source of funding — solar power — has helped reinstate the previously scheduled cuts by the district’s Visual and Performing Arts (VAPA) program. Reduced energy costs from the installation of solar panels at dozens of school sites are anticipated to bring in $1.1 million over the next year. “The San Diego School District has really been going forward with the solar energy program. They’ve expanded on it and they’ve figured out how to renegotiate the contract for the solar company they work with so they’d be paid out on a regular basis instead of as a lump sum at the end of the year,” said San Diego Alliance for Arts Education Chair Victoria Plettner-Saunders. “They’re doing everything they can to get a seemingly impossible situation to turn around.” Saunders said. Board member Scott Barnett, who crafted the motion said it was always his intention to find the funding to restore the arts program. “We just needed to figure out where,” he said. Thirty-five teaching positions, primarily music instructors in elementary schools, and the Suzuki violin program at Crown Point Music Academy were secured through this reinvestment. Although funding for elementary school arts programs is back, more than one in ten teachers in San Diego remains laid off, including La Jolla High and Muirlands Middle Schools Instrumental Music Director Michael Fiedler. Although the music program still exists at both schools, six instrumental music teachers have passed through the position in the last eight years, shrinking the program by more than 80 percent in less than a decade. Despite Fiedler’s ability to get the program headed back in the right direction, the district laid him off due to seniority-based cuts. “The problem is keeping a strong and consistent focus,” Fiedler said. “It is questionable how long the program can sustain this kind of shifting.” He said there will definitely be a music program at both schools next year, but right now nobody knows who will be teaching it. “It could be me or it could be someone who has taught elementary school choir for 15 years and has no experience at the secondary level,” he said. “Both principals are fighting to keep me in the position, but this is a situation that is largely out of their hands.” For the fourth consecutive year, the board faces drastic cost-cutting measures — $114 million in total — to balance its $1 billion operating budget based on state deficits. The board must pass its final budget by Thursday, June 30. To donate to La Jolla High School’s “Conquer the Cuts” — a nonprofit effort to help restore $200,000 in budget shortfalls for La Jolla High School’s 2011-12 school year — visit http://www.ljhs.sandi.net/Foundatio-n/ConquerTheCuts.html or call Executive Director Sandi Pawl at (858) 551-1250.