In nearly every city budget cycle, one item that the mayor left for dead on the budget-cutting room floor becomes the subject of an all-out resuscitation campaign.

This year, the brewing budget squabble revolves around the kids—the kids who “don’t get enough art these days,” according to the colorful postcards landing at city hall in support of funding for the regional Arts Partners program. Arts Partners, under the Regional Arts and Culture Council, is a program that would “integrate the community’s arts and cultural resources into the education of every K-8 student in the region’s school districts” by 2012, according to Arts Partners Project Manager Marna Stalcup. In other words, the program puts artists in classrooms—or will, by January of next year, if funding is adequately continued.

Stalcup explains that the $150,000 in city funding—just .6 percent of the city’s $33 million surplus, as the Regional Arts and Culture Council points out in an action alert sent out to arts supporters—along with pending funding from Clackamas, Washington and Multnomah counties, would help the program leverage private sector funds.

The postcard and email campaign is currently targeting Potter, whose chief of staff Austin Raglione is reportedly “trying to find a way to have RACC fund [Arts Partners] with our own budget increase,” says Jeff Hawthorne, RACC’s Director of Community Affairs. RACC’s funding does increase each year—based on increases in the “urban wage earners’ consumer price index” (say that five times fast) or growth in hotel and motel tax revenues. But that increase—$309,000 this year, for a total of $3.4 million in city funding for RACC’s next fiscal year—is already spoken for, slated to fund services RACC already provides under its city contract.

“There are things the city has asked us to do that we can’t take away from to fund Arts Partners,” Hawthorne says. “This is a new program. It needs new investment. The City of Portland should be on the record as supporting arts education, to help us unlock potentially millions of dollars from the private sector.”

Two days after the mayor released his Arts Partners-free budget, the “please support this” ready-to-mail postcards—complete with a photo of three kids crafting a giant purple hippo in a classroom—were printed and circulating at the monthly arts community cocktail hour, Art Spark. The mayor’s office has also received several hundred emails urging Arts Partners funding. But if Potter doesn’t start to budge, Arts Partners supporters will turn their attention to Commissioners Randy Leonard and Dan Saltzman (as the arts and culture commissioner, Sam Adams is already a shoo-in for supporting the request).