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Ralph Opacic Says Arts Programs Disappear First When School Budgets Shrink
- Ralph Opacic, founder of Orange County School of the Arts and now chief executive of Orange County Music & Dance, says arts education keeps losing when budgets tighten, and argues that funding built to survive a downturn matters more than any single grant or gift.
A Pattern He Has Watched for Decades
Santa Ana, California, November 11, 2026, ZEX PR WIRE, Ralph Opacic founded Orange County School of the Arts in 1987, during a period when school districts across California were cutting arts programs to protect core academic budgets. He has watched the same pattern repeat in every downturn since.
“When money gets tight, arts programs are usually the first line item someone circles,” Opacic said. “That’s true in public schools and it’s true in nonprofits. It isn’t because people don’t value the arts. It’s because arts programs often don’t have funding built to outlast a bad year.”
Opacic says that pattern gets too little attention outside the arts world itself. Parents notice when a program disappears. Few ask why it was vulnerable in the first place.
Funding Built to Survive a Downturn
OCSA grew in part because it became a tuition-free option at a time when other schools and districts were retreating from arts education. The Orange County School of the Arts Foundation, a separate 501(c)(3) that Opacic has also led since 1988, was built specifically to keep tuition-free access intact regardless of what was happening in any single district’s budget.
“A school that depends entirely on one funding source is one bad year away from cutting the program,” Opacic said. “A foundation, an endowment, a board that treats fundraising as part of the mission and not an afterthought, that’s what lets a program keep its doors open when the money gets harder to find.”
At Orange County Music & Dance, where Opacic now serves as chief executive, the organization has built a $5 million endowment specifically so that no student is priced out of its classes. Opacic points to that structure as the kind of planning that keeps programming intact through economic cycles rather than shrinking every time one hits.
What Gets Overlooked
Opacic says the conversation about arts education tends to focus on programming: what classes are offered, what the student outcomes look like, which students get into which conservatories. Less attention goes to the financial architecture underneath it.
“Everyone wants to talk about the recital or the student who got into a great program,” he said. “Almost nobody asks how the organization is going to fund that same opportunity for the next ten years, or the next recession. That’s the question that actually determines whether a program survives.”
He says institutions that want to serve students over the long run need to treat fundraising and financial planning as part of the educational mission, not a separate administrative task handled after the fact.
A Pathway From Early Childhood Through Adulthood
Opacic says the funding question matters even more as arts organizations try to serve students across a longer span of their lives. Orange County Music & Dance now offers programming for children as young as six months through adult classes, alongside pre-conservatory and conservatory tracks for middle and high school performers.
“If you want a pathway that starts in early childhood and continues into adulthood, you can’t fund it one grant cycle at a time,” Opacic said. “You need a structure that’s still standing in fifteen years, not just this fall.”
About Ralph Opacic
Ralph S. Opacic, Ed.D., founded Orange County School of the Arts in Santa Ana, California, in 1987 and led the school as president and executive director until 2021. He also founded and led the Orange County School of the Arts Foundation, West Coast School of the Arts, Pacific Coast Dance Fest, and West Coast Musical Theatre Company. Opacic currently serves as chief executive of Orange County Music & Dance in Irvine, California, and has consulted with the DeVos Institute of Arts Management at the Kennedy Center. He holds a doctorate in education from the University of Southern California.
