If you need office supplies at your job you walk down to the supply closet and get pens, pencils, a ream of paper, paper clips, pretty much everything you need to function in your job. Now imagine having to bring your own supplies in to the office so that you could do your work. Not only do you have to bring your own supplies you have to ask your customers to bring supplies into your office as well just so you can do your job. To top it all off you are expected, in some cases, to get anywhere from 3-6 continuing education credits at your own expense.
Sounds pretty unreasonable doesn’t it? Well, it is unreasonable and it is what public school teachers around the country are doing every single school year. I asked several friends of mine who are public school teachers what they spend on average on school supplies every year, the responses I received were that they spend anywhere between $500 and $1,500 a year on school supplies. My anecdotal evidence is backed up by research. In 2010 the NSSEA Retail Market Awareness Study found that:
A full 92 percent of teachers reported spending some amount of their own money on classroom supplies, while a smaller but still significant 85 percent reported spending their own money on instructional materials…teachers spent a total of $3.5 billion in the 2009-2010 school year, an average of $936 per teacher--$398 on supplies and $538 on instructional materials.
I had a teacher and school librarian tell me that they had to buy furniture for the classroom/library out of their own pockets. A common theme among the teachers I spoke to was that they all had supplies in the room that they purchased out of their own pockets to hand out to children whose parents were unable to purchase school supplies.
This does not end with just the teachers. School supply lists for parents have grown as well. It is not just pens, pencils, notebooks, and folders anymore. Today parents are expected to purchase everything from Ziploc bags to Kleenex to wet wipes. In some communities art supplies are no longer supplied to art teachers so the parents have to purchase them and they are shared amongst all of the students.
How can we expect our children to thrive in a classroom environment when their teachers are not given the tools to do their jobs? Our schools are not failing; we are failing our schools. In the name of lower taxes for corporations and the rich we have put the onus of educating our children on poorly paid and overworked teachers. Parents who are living paycheck to paycheck have to go without in order to purchase the ever-increasing list of school supplies. I imagine it won’t be long before we see toilet paper listed as a school supply.