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My high-school graduation requirements didn’t have the concept of an arts credit. Had I not had friends whose parents wanted their children to appreciate concerts and plays, I would not have seen live theater before my college roommate joined the Greek tragic chorus of “Antigone.”

Although I never told my roommate, as my first toe in the waters of live performance, that production would have been my last.

I had to reflect back on my own serendipity at the news the Florida Senate Education Committee had sandwiched the word “practical” into a barely 2-year-old arts unit requirement for high-school graduation during its budget deliberations last week. One word — but penned into our educational mandates, it would apparently allow nursing, auto mechanics, home economics and dozens of other courses to stand in as the students’ arts requirement.

Practical? Yes. Arts? No. They’re skills with a necktie name. Right now, arts educators and supporters are working quickly behind the scenes to get that word stricken, or at least changed to “practical arts with an arts foundation.” Because this is the final week of Florida budget deliberations, today we may know the results — or suffer through still another round of lobbying that can contort this concept even further.

Of course, accepting “practical arts” as arts would save money in strapped school systems, which could slash some arts teachers from staff rolls next year. But what we save in money, we lose in development. Arts works on so many levels it’s hard to say whether I’m indebted more to piano lessons for the ability to appreciate a symphony or to a fine arts survey class for an understanding of just what’s making that perfume ad in Vogue jump out at me.

“We’re surrounded by the arts. It’s important we be intelligent consumers of them,” says Linda Cummings, fine arts coordinator for Collier County Schools. Then she goes for the jugular with a few facts:

-- Stories in the Harvard Business Review in 2004 and just this year in The New York Times say business schools are looking for fine arts graduates as their best potential for business leaders because they have developed their creative minds.

-- Medical schools from Yale to the University of Texas are adding “The Art of Observation,” a museum-visitation class, to their curricula, because the art class makes their graduating doctors better diagnosticians.

The United Arts Council of Collier County already finds its Miracle After School Program, an intensive combination of play, arts and tutoring, is helping at-risk kids learn better. But program manager Janice Paine, who is also a free-lance arts writer for this newspaper, says the council likes what it sees in terms of social skills: greater self-esteem, tolerance, ability to work together on projects, collaborating and understanding others better.

Paine points out that research links arts to everything from spatial visual coordination to math, and those who want the goods can find it here: www.aep-arts.org

Are arts head candy to be eliminated in times of diet or a steak sandwich for the spirit? I agree with Cummings, Paine and the Harvard Business Review: it’s the latter.

One of the shortcomings of representative democracy is that we redraw the landscape of the state every two to four years like this. Cummings confirmed that Collier County high-school students are only now getting used to the idea that they will study some form of art, from speech and debate to sculpture, or music. Suddenly, that decision can be gone.

Too many children in the U.S. are getting their only concept of drama from “ER” and their art from sports program covers. Let’s not let that happen in Florida.

If we relegate our kids’ education to mercenary values, we should not wonder if they fail to rise above them.

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Harriet Heithaus of Naples is the At Home section editor and writes about the arts for the Daily News; she is a member of the newspaper’s editorial board.