Teacher panhandles for supply money - Funny but sad

A teacher from Oklahoma was in the news this week for a social media post showing her panhandling on the side of the road to get money for school supplies. This poor woman makes $35,000 BEFORE taxes and spends about 2 grand on her classroom. Now, I don't think I've ever personally spent quite that much on classroom supplies, but the sad truth is that so many teachers do need to purchase things out of pocket because the school's budgets do not cover these things. Now it's one thing to buy googly eyes for crafts, but I remember (not fondly) the days of buying textbooks (used on Amazon for a penny plus 4 dollars shipping), all manner of pencils, tape, glue, markers, etc, and, the worst, copy paper. Yep. We had to buy our own paper to make copies. We were supplied with a couple of reams every quarter. If you teach 100 students, that's 10 copies per kids you are able to make with what the school supplied for you. The best was when we were limited to only making 500 copies per semester using our log in codes on the copy machine. So do the math again- 500 copies per semester divided by 100 students equals 5 copies PER SEMESTER you are allowed to make. I know you're thinking, wait, this is not just about insufficient budgets, this is about going paperless and moving to digital learning tools because 21st century learning blah blah blah. No. That was not it (see the sentence above about having to purchase textbooks - you really think we had computers?). The irony was that this copy rationing happened at the same time the district was pushing us to use text annotation with the students. We were given 2 or 3 professional development workshops on how to have students mark up the text with all kinds of juicy annotations. But they only get 5 pages a semester to annotate. Too many of us wound up going to Kinko's to make our copies in the evenings. All out of pocket.

Budgets are balanced on the backs of the most vulnerable. When teachers don't have the supplies they need, students suffer. But teachers are often expected to be martyrs and sacrifice their earnings to stock what should be provided. This goes beyond asking a nurse to purchase their own scrubs to wear to work. It's more like asking the nurse to purchase their own syringes for patients. School districts need more funding to be able to provide the best education for their children, and supplies are just one facet of what it takes.