The arts encompassing visual arts, music, drama, and crafts occupy a constitutionally recognised and educationally significant place in Uganda's national curriculum, contributing to the creative, emotional, cultural, and cognitive development of learners and supporting the country's creative industries and cultural heritage. However, art programs in Ugandan secondary schools have remained chronically underdeveloped relative to science, mathematics, and commercial subjects, with art teaching positions persistently unfilled, art facilities largely absent, and art subject enrolments declining as a proportion of total secondary school enrolments. This quantitative study examines the barriers to the growth of art programs in secondary schools in Mbarara District, Uganda, employing a descriptive cross-sectional design. Structured questionnaires were administered to 218 respondents comprising art teachers, other subject teachers, head teachers, students enrolled in art programs, and district education officers across 22 purposively selected secondary schools. Barriers were operationalised across five dimensions: resource and infrastructure barriers, teacher qualification and staffing barriers, administrative and institutional barriers, curriculum and policy barriers, and social and attitudinal barriers. Descriptive statistics, one-sample t-tests, and multiple regression analysis were employed. Findings reveal that resource and infrastructure barriers rank as the most severe (mean=4.31/5.00), followed by administrative and institutional barriers (mean=3.94), social and attitudinal barriers (mean=3.71), teacher qualification barriers (mean=3.58), and curriculum and policy barriers (mean=3.42). Multiple regression analysis identifies funding inadequacy (β=0.512), administrative de-prioritisation (β=0.387), and negative societal attitudes toward arts careers (β=0.341) as the strongest independent predictors of art program growth constraints, explaining 74.3% of variance in the composite barrier index. The study concludes with evidence-based policy recommendations targeting the structural funding, administrative, and attitudinal barriers that most severely constrain art program development in Mbarara District's secondary schools.