• 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.

• The Dallas fund manager says the questions an investor asks before writing a check matter more than the pitch they just heard.

A Different Starting Point

Dallas, Texas, November 11, 2026, ZEX PR WIRE, Gary Bassett, Founder, Chairman, and Managing Partner of HP Capital Partners in Dallas, Texas, has spent more than four decades moving through investment banking, enterprise software, and institutional asset management. He built that path at J.P. Morgan, founded and scaled Microbank before its sale to Citicorp, and led an investment banking division at Bank of America before launching HP Capital Partners in 2012.

Across those decades, he says the investors who do well are not the ones with the best spreadsheets. They are the ones who ask a short list of plain questions before they commit money, and who actually wait for honest answers.

“Most pitches are built to survive a good question,” Bassett says. “They are not built to survive four in a row.”

What Happens When the Story Stops Being True

Bassett says the first question he asks about any strategy is what happens to it when the thesis behind it breaks.

“Every investment has a story attached to it,” he says. “Rates will fall, a sector will consolidate, a currency will move. The question is not whether the story is good. It is what the manager does on the day it stops being true.”

He says investors rarely ask this directly, and managers rarely volunteer the answer, because it forces a conversation about losses before any money has changed hands.

Who Actually Owns the Risk Decision

The second question Bassett raises is about governance rather than strategy: who has the authority to cut a position, and under what conditions.

“A strategy is only as good as the person with their hand on the risk lever,” he says. “I want to know if that person has the authority to act without a committee meeting first.”

He points to his own work at HP Capital Partners, where asset allocation and risk parameters sit under direct oversight rather than a layered approval process, as the standard he measures other structures against.

What a Track Record Leaves Out

Bassett says a strong track record is the easiest thing for an investor to be shown and the hardest thing to read correctly.

“A five-year return number tells you almost nothing about how that return was earned,” he says. “It does not tell you how much leverage was used, how concentrated the positions were, or how the manager behaved in the one bad quarter that got smoothed over in the average.”

He says he asks managers to walk through their single worst period in detail rather than their best one, because the worst period shows how a strategy actually fails.

How It Fits With Everything Else Already Owned

The last question Bassett raises is one he says most individual investors skip entirely: how a new position interacts with everything already in the portfolio.

“People evaluate investments one at a time, as if each one exists in isolation,” he says. “It never does. A great strategy can still be the wrong addition if it moves the same way as everything else you already hold.”

He says this question matters more in periods when markets move together across asset classes, since diversification on paper can disappear exactly when it is needed most.

Questions Before Comfort

Bassett says none of these four questions are complicated, and that is the point.

“The goal is not to sound sophisticated,” he says. “The goal is to know what you actually own, and what it will do when conditions change. Most of the damage I have seen over the years came from a question that never got asked, not an answer nobody could have known.”

He says the habit of asking before committing carries over from his own background: the diligence standards built at J.P. Morgan, the operational discipline required to scale Microbank across banking and construction clients worldwide, and the risk oversight he now runs directly at HP Capital Partners.

“Capital markets reward patience with questions more than they reward confidence in answers,” he says. “That has not changed in forty-five years, and I do not expect it to change now.”

About Gary Bassett

Gary Bassett is the Founder, Chairman, and Managing Partner of HP Capital Partners, an investment firm based in Dallas, Texas. His career spans investment banking at J.P. Morgan, the founding and sale of Microbank Software Inc. to Citicorp, and a tenure as Managing Director of Investment Banking at Bank of America. He is a longtime resident of Highland Park, Texas, and a member of the Dallas Hall Society at Southern Methodist University.

• Andrew Dutil lays out what he expects to change in project controls and contract administration over the next year, and where that leaves people managing public works contracts.

A Harder Year for Cost Estimates

West Palm Beach, Florida, November 11, 2026, ZEX PR WIRE, Andrew Dutil has spent his career on the owner and contractor sides of civil works contracts, most of it tied to the US Army Corps of Engineers. He expects the coming year to put more strain on cost estimates than usual.

Material pricing has not settled into a predictable pattern. Dutil says that unpredictability shows up first in change orders, where both sides have to agree on a number before work can keep moving. When the baseline price keeps shifting, that agreement takes longer to reach.

“A change order used to be a formality on a lot of jobs,” Dutil says. “Now it is a negotiation almost every time, because nobody trusts last quarter’s pricing to hold.”

Claims Consulting Will See More Demand

Dutil works in claims consulting and contract administration as an independent contractor, and he expects that side of the field to get busier.

Projects delayed by pricing disputes or supply gaps tend to generate claims later, once someone has to account for the lost time. Dutil says he expects more of those claims to surface over the next year, particularly on larger public works jobs where schedules were set before current pricing conditions took hold.

“The claims coming now are not about bad planning,” he says. “They are about plans that were reasonable when they were written and then got overtaken by events nobody controlled.”

He expects contract administrators to spend more time documenting the reasons behind delays, not just the delays themselves, because that documentation is what eventually supports a claim or defends against one.

Scheduling Discipline Becomes Non-Negotiable

Dutil holds a Project Management Professional credential and works regularly with scheduling tools like Primavera. He says the next year will reward people who keep their schedules current rather than treating them as a document filed away after kickoff.

“A schedule that nobody updates is worse than no schedule,” Dutil says. “It gives people false confidence right up until the point it fails them.”

He expects more project teams to tighten how often they revisit the critical path, especially on jobs where a single delayed shipment can move a completion date by weeks. That kind of tracking, he says, is what separates a change order that gets resolved in a week from one that drags on for months.

What Dutil Tells People to Watch

Dutil’s outlook comes down to a few things he tells people to pay attention to over the next year:

• Material and labor pricing that moves faster than contract terms account for.
• Change orders that pile up without clear resolution timelines.
• Schedules that have not been revised in weeks despite known delays.
• Claims language that gets written after the fact instead of during the project.

None of these are new problems, Dutil says. What is different is how fast they compound when pricing is unstable.

“The fundamentals do not change,” he says. “What changes is how much room you have for error, and right now there is less of it than there used to be.”

Dutil’s background includes OSHA 30 certification and coursework through the Defense Acquisition University in contracting and facilities engineering. He says that mix of technical and contract knowledge is what the next year will demand most from people in his field: someone who can read a schedule, understand a contract clause, and see where the two are about to collide.

About Andrew Dutil

Andrew Dutil is an independent contractor working in project management, project controls, contract administration, and claims consulting. He is a combat veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom II who served with the US Army and later worked as a civil engineer with the US Army Corps of Engineers. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Architectural Studies and a Master of Architecture, both earned with honors from Norwich University. Dutil is a Project Management Professional and holds OSHA 30 certification, along with coursework through the Defense Acquisition University in contracting and facilities engineering. He lives in West Palm Beach, Florida.