School supplies are often in short supply in the classroom, so many teachers pay to provide them.
By Janet Nguyen
Listener Kathy Campbell, who had heard a story about the long list of school supplies that parents have to provide, wrote in with this question:
I don’t remember any of this from the 1950s when I was in school (maybe pencils?), and not anything like so much from the 1980s when my daughter was in school (still mostly pencils?). What’s behind this change, where teachers have to provide hundreds of dollars worth of supplies for their classrooms, too?
Wendy Threatt, a fourth-grade teacher with the Escondido Union School District in California, has spent as much as $1,000 of her own money on classroom needs during a school year.
Sometimes it’s for supplies, like high-quality paper and books for her classroom library. Other times, it’s for her students’ basic needs — shoes, jackets, even food.
“I have snacks for my students because they’re hungry. Some of them don’t get dinner,” she said.
But to Threatt, this is not going “above and beyond.” It’s the bare minimum needed to ensure her students’ success and well-being.
“I would just like the public to be aware that whenever you walk into a teacher’s classroom,” she said, “that what you’re looking at is their money — their money put toward the education and the success of all those children in that room.”
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