Omaha South High School is about to lose two of its three dance teachers. Ms. Erin and Ms. Erica, both hired under contracts that the district has chosen not to renew, will not be returning next year due to budget cuts. We are asking the school board to reverse this decision.

Ask any dancer at South about Ms. Erin and Ms. Erica and you will hear the same thing. Students love them. For most of the dancers in this program, Ms. Erin and Ms. Erica have been a staple of their entire dance adventure at South, the people who taught them their first real combinations, pushed them through their first hard rehearsals, and showed up for them on the days that mattered. You cannot quietly remove people like that from a program and expect the program to feel the same.

This is not a small department losing a small piece of itself. Ms. Erin and Ms. Erica have built something real at South. They have trained dancers, mentored students through some of the hardest years of their lives, and turned the dance room into a place where kids actually want to be. The discipline, the creativity, the sense that students are being taken seriously as artists. That does not happen by accident, and it does not transfer when the people responsible for it are gone.

The plan for next year leaves Ms. Danielle, the head teacher, to run the entire program on her own. Ms. Danielle is recovering from a major surgery she had only a few months ago. She is talented, committed, and absolutely capable of leading the program, but no one person should be expected to teach every dance class at South while still healing. This is not a question of whether she is good enough. It is a question of whether the district is willing to set her up to fail, and to gut a program that hundreds of students rely on, in order to save a line item.

Cutting Ms. Erin and Ms. Erica does not just shrink the dance department. It overloads the one teacher left standing, eliminates the variety of styles and perspectives students currently get, and tells every kid in that program that the work they do does not matter enough to fund.

We are asking the Omaha South administration and the OPS school board to:

1. Renew Ms. Erin and Ms. Erica's contracts for the coming school years.
2. Protect the dance program from further cuts while Ms. Danielle continues to recover.
3. Treat arts contracts as part of the educational core at South, not as the first thing to go when budgets tighten.

If you have ever watched a student at South light up because of what they learned in that dance room, please sign. If you believe Ms. Danielle deserves real support coming back from surgery, please sign. If you think a school the size of South deserves a real dance program, please sign.

Keep Ms. Erin and Ms. Erica at South. Keep the program whole.