LOCAL TEACHERS SUPPLY MORE THAN JUST KNOWLEDGE
By Anne Regan
Walking around any store at this time of the year, it is almost impossible to ignore the “back to school” signs staring you in the face. As a teacher, I get a mixture of feelings: either, “no way, where did the summer go?” or “I am so excited to see my students again and get started on another school year!”
However, the preparations for school are many when it comes to being a teacher. We have to get our curriculums in order, attend trainings, clean and organize our classrooms, make copies and shop for school supplies.
My daughter is a school supply fanatic! She looks forward to this time of year and is so excited to see what new organizational supplies exist, while I on the other hand tend to look for bulk sales. (I went through 3,000 pencils, 200 highlighters, 200 crayons and 500 pens last school year! This was for the 150 students that I taught.)
It may surprise some people that teachers buy an abundance of school supplies for students who show up without them. This seems to be due to many circumstances. A quick internet search turns up inquiries such as, “They send home a big long list of supplies for you to get your kids. I thought the teachers/school were supposed to buy these things? I spend enough money on clothes, why can’t they supply paper and pencil, etc.?” or “Why am I supplying the teacher with Expo markers? I shouldn’t have to buy her supplies!”
In response, I can say that teachers are not trying to “steal your money” by making you buy school supplies. On an average year, I estimate that I spend at least $2,000 on supplies for my students. This includes supplies for special projects.
It’s not right that public school budgets are regularly slashed and aren’t big enough to cover the basic necessities essential for our kids’ success. (You know, like pencils.)
But as much as parents dread shopping for school supplies, teachers dread having to ask. I’d love to stop asking parents to bring in a combined total of 800 pencils or 50 boxes of Kleenex and just buy them myself. But as a teacher, I simply cannot afford to do it. I hate that I am the only full-time salaried worker in our house. I have an advanced degree, and we are still living paycheck to paycheck. It feels shameful to have to ask every — single — year for donations. Teachers don’t want to ask for handouts. We just want to teach.
The National School Supply & Equipment Association (now the Education Market Association) did a study in 2013 on this very subject. Public school teachers spent $1.6 billion of their own money to buy school supplies to do their job. More than 99 percent of all public school teachers said they’d used their own funds for supplies, spending an average of $485 per person during the 2012-13 year. This is how it was broken down: $149 for school supplies, $198 for instructional materials, and $138 for “other classroom materials.” Ten percent spent $1,000 or more of their own money in total for the school year.
I know that buying supplies for our students is a common practice, but I was curious how many of my colleagues generally spent their own money on back to school supplies. So, I took to social media to find out.
Tessa Fritsche is a seventh grade science teacher. She says, “We have to buy an endless list of supplies, not only for our classroom, but also for all of the labs that we have to do. While the school does help us out, I teach at a Title 1 school, so we don’t get all the help we need. That is when we ask the parents to help if they can.”
This is my 12th year teaching and I am still surprised when students show up on the first day of school with nothing but the clothes on their back.
High school English teacher Jennifer Rumsey says, “I always have high school students who come the first week without anything. I get paper, pens and pencils from the school office. But I buy lots of extra notebook paper, pens, mechanical pencils and highlighters. I share these all year. I go to CVS or Kroger once a week and always buy more of these things because after December, kids are out of paper and writing utensils. They don’t buy any more. I don’t know their circumstances, so I’d rather provide it myself than make any of my students feel badly about not having something. I spend probably $300 or more every year. This doesn’t include pens and post-its for me.”
As a parent, I never thought buying school supplies for my children was optional. I always budgeted for it because I knew what to expect.
Stacey Castolenia is a parent and teacher, so she can see the topic from both sides. “As a parent, I get everything on the list and I’m prepared for the cost. As a science teacher, I keep my list short and simple (6-1 subject spirals, colored pencils, Kleenex, paper towels) to keep costs low, but I still have students with no supplies … not even a pencil!”
To put this into perspective as it pertains to parents who don’t want to supply their child’s supplies, the average cost of school supplies for two children per day totals around $343 for the school year. If divided, the daily cost is $0.97 cents for student supplies to support teachers providing instruction for seven hours per day.
As a parent, I truly believe school supplies are part of the cost of being a parent, just liking feeding your kids. Parents who don’t buy supplies for their children are in essence hurting them. It is a huge disservice to their children. It makes an uncomfortable situation for many kids to have to ask for supplies. They are embarrassed many times.
If a parent demands the school provide their child with supplies, nine times out of 10, it comes out of a teacher’s pocket, not the school’s. If schools provided all children with supplies, taxes would increase exponentially in a system that is already underfunded.
My first year of teaching, I received a $200 stipend to help get my classroom supplies started. That was over 12 years ago. I have never been offered any other kind of assistance from the schools where I have worked. One school even required teachers to purchase their own copy paper. I seriously cut back on copies made that year and still managed to go through four cases of paper on my dime.
Fritsche says, “I have had a parent get angry and say that it is our job as teachers to provide every single need for the students. We simply do not have the salary to provide that much for our students. Each teacher has around 150 students. If you do the math, it is impossible to provide for our students and still provide for our families. I just spent $180 at Wal-Mart for the necessities for my new classroom this year. That doesn’t count the $300 I have spent on Amazon for other classroom supplies.”
It seems silly to me that teachers, already not paid enough, are expected to shell out money to cover school supplies for their students out of the kindness of their hearts.
Which brings up another interesting topic — community supplies. I know some parents oppose the idea of buying community supplies for a classroom (where all of the supplies purchased go into one bin and all kids pull from those supplies). A 2014 poll shows that 17 percent of parents want their kids to have their own supplies and not share them. This group of parents believed having individual supplies teaches children how to take care of their stuff. Twenty-seven percent of parents wanted their kids to have individual supplies but said they would donate to a community pot to help kids who didn’t have supplies. It seems the biggest objection to community supplies is the lack of prior knowledge. Twenty-one percent of parents didn’t care if the supplies were shared, but wanted to know before hand.
I rarely do community supplies in my classroom, other than Kleenex and paper towels. But, I understand the reason behind them.
When it comes to community supplies in the classroom, I will admit that I don’t get why people get upset. It’s a public school — it’s a community resource, meaning the community contributes to it to make the community better by educating people. I am OK with sharing supplies, as long as everyone gets down the road to our learning goal in the classroom.
Even if you buy a special folder for class and it ends up going into a pot of community supplies when you didn’t realize it was going to happen is a fair life lesson that won’t do kids much harm to learn.
A mother of five, Rebekah Bernard says she loves getting her kids ready for a new year and school supply shopping. She says it’s the start of a year of adventure, school projects and scheduling. Bernard says, “This year, I spent $250-$300 on the four I have in school, but I got everything they needed in one-stop shopping from supplies to shoes and uniforms! I have seen a shift in parental feelings towards shopping for supplies due to schools offering the box deal that is easily delivered to schools the first week of school.”
Not all schools offer the box deal, but I can imagine how much easier back to school can be with this option.
Maybe it’s not so much that teachers have to spend their own paychecks on classroom supplies, but they want to because an overwhelming majority of teachers genuinely care about their students.
I wish all parents knew how much teachers love and sacrifice for their students. Pretty much all teachers I know will be spending for their classroom despite having to cut back the grocery bill for their family.
Comments are closed.