Teachers where I live are constantly asking for donations of basic school supplies, snacks, tissues, and cleaning supplies for classrooms. It is incredibly disheartening.
Comment on Parents opt kids out of school computers, insisting on pen-and-paper instead
LodeMike@lemmy.today 3 weeks agoWhat the fuck is it with schools being stingy with printed paper. At scale its less than a cent a sheet
SinningStromgald@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Mirshe@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
So many donations and funds for schools are earmarked, you can only spend them in specific ways. If you spend them in ways that don’t align with the earmark, it’s incredibly easy for the donors or the state to claw them back. So that $40mil your local suburban school district spent on a new football stadium? That was likely earmarked SPECIFICALLY for football, they can’t really just swish the money to better textbooks, or whatever. Same with tech funding - you get $250k to upgrade your school district with Chromebooks or whatever, you MUST buy within what the funding packet tells you you can buy, and you can’t really do anything else with it.
That doesn’t even get into the cartelization of textbooks and school software. There’s so few real options that it’s incredibly easy for these companies to collude without really looking like it’s collusion.
andros_rex@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
They also have to be paying for the software that tracks how many prints you use. It’s fucking stupid, and it’s just one of a million little ways that they make sure to punish anyone stupid enough to teach.
I ended up buying my own printer. Printing alone got me to the maximum $300 of classroom expenses I was allowed to write off on taxes.
Lemming6969@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
So you save 100 in taxes and pay 500 in printing costs… You’re down 400 for supplying your employer. Lol
Catoblepas@piefed.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
They’re pretty obviously supplying it for their students, not their employer. Weird as hell to rub someone’s nose in the fact their students are trapped in a school system that doesn’t even supply teachers with proper access to printed materials. Even Reddit used to run a donor program to help teachers out with the costs.
daychilde@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
The way I read their comment was pointing out that the employer (the school district) should be providing sufficient printing. :shrug: But there’s many ways to interpret, I suppose
Lemming6969@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
It’s like tipping… It happens because we let it. It’s so incredibly common that literally poor teachers are paying for basic supplies the school doesn’t when they should look those kids in the eyes and tell them they are sorry and that their society and school have failed them and to go home and tell their parents to vote differently.
andros_rex@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Also spent several hundred just on vinegar and baking soda for labs.
But yeah, I actually had to quit teaching after my divorce because I could no longer afford to do it!