Open Letter

If a tree loses more than 50% of her branches, she won’t get enough nutrients to survive. That’s a fair analogy for how many small businesses, like mine, are doing during these difficult times. I own a performing arts school called Forevermore Dance & Theatre Arts in the Dunning Neighborhood of Chicago. We are starting our 17th year serving the youth of our community with dance, theatre, and music lessons. We are one of the most vibrant corners of the neighborhood and have made an important impact on the lives of thousands of children through the years.

Unfortunately, this may also be our last year unless something changes. I am fighting hard to make it back to just 50% of what we were Pre-COVID, and that is just to stay in the race. We are fighting to keep our doors open. I recently watched a documentary about how the nation recovered after the Spanish Flu pandemic. Most small businesses simply closed for good, and their owners went to work in factories.

I’m fighting not just for my own family, but for my staff, and the children in my community to have a sense of normalcy and to be sure we are still here to serve our community when our nation does recover. The arts are an essential part of our human experience and are vital to our health as whole beings. That fight has required us to get creative: to learn how to deliver virtual instruction, with kids dancing in their living rooms. And now, with so many families that are themselves facing financial destruction, even the shift to virtual may not be enough to bring in the tuition we need to continue serving this community.

Throughout the past months, everything from local classrooms and business meetings have moved online. Despite not being prepared for it at all, Forevermore Dance & Theatre Arts also moved to an online model within a week of the Sheltering in Place order, moving over 70 weekly lessons to an online learning platform. Using Google Classroom and Zoom, we found a way to continue delivering live dance, theatre, and music classes. We invested in the technology that would be needed to ensure that our instructors could deliver quality classes, watching students on the screen and giving corrections and instruction just as they would in a classroom.

We believed that what we were offering was vital: a way to help maintain some normalcy and structure in children’s lives when schools were shut down and they suddenly found themselves isolated. This was affirmed when parents shared their gratitude with us, telling us that Forevermore online lessons were the only consistent, scheduled event their children had while schools struggled to navigate the early challenges of COVID-19.

Even online, dance classes help keep students physically, mentally and emotionally healthy. They gave our kids a sense of connection and community at a time when they weren’t seeing their friends and were struggling to cope with all the things they lost. I’m a parent of a 12 and 13 year old myself, and saw first-hand the impact COVID made on their world. I saw what I call the “COVID Zombie Effect,” depressed kids who have lost interest in things they used to love because they’ve lost hope of getting their old lives back. But the moment of connection provided by our classes, of bodies in motion, art, and the pleasure of physically doing something, that made a difference in the mood and well-being of my children. And it made a difference for the kids in our community, too.

We stayed connected to our students online, and because we are a part of our community, we did other things too: like story-time, dance parties, scavenger hunts, and activities for the whole family. We hung paper hearts in the windows of our school with each child’s name written on it and reminded our students that you can’t quarantine our love for dance! We held a drive by parade where students brought posters to hang in our windows, and the dancers were given personal notes from all their teachers. We produced virtual recitals, and then we did individual recitals- where one child at time came in to perform for their parents, and we held a special filming of our Homecoming performance mid-August where students that were comfortable came back together to dance with their peers again.

Although we lost 60% of our income, we continued to serve our community by providing nearly $10,000 in scholarships to families in need. We have continued to invest in the future by equipping our classrooms with new technology and becoming a tech-enabled studio so we can teach a hybrid of in person and virtual classes as we move forward into a new normal. This summer we made practical renovations to our space to aid in social distancing guidelines, and we developed a safety guidebook and carefully addressed all of guidelines for safely teaching in person lessons. We’ve worked with our staff to develop strategies for teaching hybrid courses, with some students in the studio and others participating from home.

The first time we had students return to our physical space, a little girl with tears streaming from her eyes said, “Thank you. I missed my life so much!” That is why we fought so hard to do whatever it took to still be here, and why we are still fighting to survive. Investing in the youth of the community matters now more than ever. Although all of our teaching artists are passionate about their art forms, we do so much more than teach dance, theatre, and music: we teach children to believe in themselves, to think critically, and to work with each other to be the best versions of themselves. This isn’t just a business.

We are still trying. We are asking for donations from the community to help build a scholarship fund to help families pay tuition who otherwise wouldn’t be willing or able to. We hope that, if we can offer free instruction to enough students, funded by generous support from the public, that it will let us continue employing our teachers and maintain our facilities long enough for our city to recover. But we may yet become another casualty of the pandemic. We still have hope, and a fervent belief that what we offer our community is worth fighting for.

The stories about small businesses closing are so common now, it’s hard not to just shrug and say “that’s too bad.” But that ignores the impact many of these businesses have on their communities, and the vital role some of them play in the lives of Chicagoans. And for my business, it ignores the painful reality that the children, who would otherwise come to Forevermore to learn to dance and express themselves as artists, will lose a vital and formative childhood experience. Businesses like mine need more help than we are getting. We need elected officials on our side, people in positions of power who understand the devastating impact the pandemic has had, not just economically, but socially and spiritually to the soul of our community. We need you to fight for us.

With hope, and heart,

Kerrie Anne Korzatkowski