The Kentucky Governor’s School for the Arts, which provides free studio arts education to Kentucky high school students, will reinstate its new media program for the next fiscal year. Earlier this month, the arts education organization announced it would suspend the new media program for one year to help address its $50,000 budget shortfall, the result of state-wide 8.4 percent budget cuts designed to address Kentucky’s structural deficit. GSA is an agency of Kentucky’s Tourism, Arts and Heritage cabinet. A private donation from Louisville philanthropists Gil and Augusta Holland, as well as additional funding from the office of the secretary of the Tourism, Arts and Heritage cabinet, will pay for the program this year. Cabinet spokesperson Gil Lawson says the state contribution came from leftover cabinet grant funds. “Our agency was able to fill that gap because we felt it was important and we were able to muster the resources for this,” says Lawson.Suspending the new media program would have recouped about three-quarters of GSA’s $50,000 budget shortfall. The Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts will raise an additional $13,000 to address GSA’s remaining budget shortfall. GSA executive director Carrie Nath says the new media program accounted for a larger chunk of the budget shortfall than they had originally calculated.“This specific discipline has a lot of equipment costs and additional costs other disciplines might not have because of the nature of the artistic discipline," says Nath. "The total when we were completely finished was $37,000.”Last summer, GSA served 225 students in nine disciplines in its competitive three-week summer residential program. New media students study video production, animation and digital imagery in the summer program and at free workshops held across the state every fall.In 2013, GSA will pare down the summer new media program slightly, admitting ten students instead of 12. New media will be offered at all four of this fall's four ArtShops, the free day-long workshops GSA offers to high school students across the state. Applications for the 2013 summer program will be available online in October.
