Lil Baby is lending his voice to the push for California schools to receive funding for the arts. At an Our Generation Music event held on Thursday (Oct. 6), he delivered impassioned remarks about the impact having access to creative outlets in school can have on students.

“A couple schools they got arts and crafts programs, but a majority of schools in the Atlanta Public Schools that I was in they don’t,” said the “Right On” rapper. He spoke alongside Dr. Dre, Jimmy Iovine, and former Los Angeles Unified Schools Superintendent Austin Beutner at a Proposition 28 panel at Santa Monica High School.

According to The Sacramento Bee, if passed, the proposition would provide LA schools with between $800 million to $1 billion in additional funding. The publication stated, “Just 1 in 5 California public schools have a full-time music or arts teacher, depriving millions of students of the opportunity.”

Baby added on to his comments about Atlanta schools, “They kinda cut from all of those opportunities. For a person like me, who grew up in that, if I had that opportunity I could’ve went way further. I know a lot of people who look up to me. For instance, like, ‘I want to be a rapper’ or ‘I want to be an engineer’ or ‘I want to make beats.’ It’s like, go start. If they had it in the school, I feel like that could be a whole other conversation for what children are doing outside of school. There’s nothing else to do.”

During the last recession, which took place between 2007 and 2009, school districts across the country, including Atlanta Public Schools, cut millions in funding that covered teacher salaries and art programs. According to The Atlanta Journal Constitution, APS began the process of rebuilding arts curriculum at schools in 2017. You can watch a snippet of Baby’s remarks in the post below.