Dear Arne, Until we no longer see teachers having to ........

..... buy their own school supplies, shut the fuck up and HELP THEM.

I've been saying this for YEARS. If anyone was really serious about school reform the first thing they'd do is buy us school supplies. It's a no brainer.

And frankly if he continues down this path for the next two years, this teacher is not going to vote for him.

He is attacking me and my profession directly and I simply can't condone that kind of action. As they say, all politics is personal, and if he continues to rip education to shreds in the manner he has been, I will personally take my vote elsewhere.

Instead he'll just put supplies on an island and put a bunch of teachers there to compete with each other to get the supplies. "Survivor: Education Challenge!!" (aka as RTTT).

I'm a teacher. I do not & will not buy supplies. I cannot afford to give students pens, pencils, paper, notebooks, kleenex, etc. I teach 125 kids a day, if I gave each of them minimally $5 worth of supplies, that's $625. If their parents won't supply them, then the school should. Prior to teaching I worked for private companies, none of them told me I must buy my own supplies in order to do my job.

What I use for bulletin boards and posters, is whatever I can receive free from organizations.

Question #2: If the school that should provide supplies does not do so, what do you do?

In case you haven't figured it out yet, I seriously doubt you are a teacher. I've been teaching 30 years and I've never known a teacher who refuses to buy supplies for kids who need them. I also have never known a teacher who worries about paying for bulletin boards and posters. LOL

Have been teaching for 5 years. My students know that I don't supply anything. When they beg, I send them to the office to see if anything can be found. They sometimes come back with something. I've had parents come in and yell at me that I don't give their child notebooks and pens. It is something I will not back down on.

I also don't take the $250 tax deduction available to teachers.

Good luck with your plan. You're going to need it.

I buy about $300 a year in hardware store stuff for my classes, as well as printer's ink and occasionally, the printer itself! as the schools contract with a brand I dislike and printers wear out quickly in a dusty environment like my ceramics classroom. I very rarely get reimbursed for that stuff.

they somehow learn without my giving them what their parents or the school should be supplying

:kick:

President Obama wants Congress to pass emergency education funding legislation that would provide $23 billion to preserve teacher jobs in the face of massive impending layoffs across the country.

"We are gravely concerned that ongoing state and local budget challenges are threatening hundreds of thousands of teacher jobs for the upcoming school year, with estimates ranging from 100,000 to 300,000 education jobs at risk," Education Secretary Arne Duncan wrote in a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Majority Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.

"Without swift action, millions of children will experience these budget cuts in one way or another through reductions in class time; cuts to early childhood programs, extracurricular activities, and summer school; and reduced course offerings as teachers are laid off," the letter continued.

**********

The Keep Our Educators Working Act (S. 3206) will:

* Provide $23 billion to help school districts avert educator layoffs in the upcoming school year;
* Make sure that our children’s education is not shortchanged by the economic crisis; and
* Enable districts to continue to implement positive programs to help ensure that all students receive the great education they deserve.

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