Why does that not surprise me?
Posted on 08/24/2011 9:50:09 AM PDT by Libloather
A lesson in finance: Parents, teachers prepare for back-to-school expenses
By Megan Hart | The Muskegon Chronicle
Updated: Monday, August 22, 2011, 10:14 AM
**SNIP**
Handing out the list early gives parents a chance to hit the sales, minimizing costs, Beal said, and the school still buys supplies so students who can't afford them aren't left behind.
“If they have tough times, we'll make sure they get what they need,” she said.
At North Muskegon Elementary, the youngest students need relatively few supplies for personal use, but are asked to contribute items to the class, such as colored paper, plastic bandages, safety pins, pencils, tissues and toilet paper.
“We've always done it that way,” North Muskegon Elementary Principal Mitri Zainea said. “It has helped our budget significantly over the years.”
Sarah VanTine sees back-to-school shopping from both sides – and both are costing her.
She teaches kindergarten at Calvary Christian Schools in Fruitport, where her daughter is starting ninth grade. Other than a graphing calculator, her daughter mostly needs inexpensive things, like a sturdy backpack and binders, she said.
She buys some art supplies for the little ones with her own money, but is asking parents to contribute disinfecting wipes and other cleaning supplies.
“Otherwise, that comes out of our pocket,” VanTine said. “There's so many cutbacks that teachers have to do a lot of their own cleaning.”
She said she sympathizes with parents who have to buy for large families. The little ones want folders and backpacks with their favorite characters instead of the cheaper, plain ones, and older kids need expensive calculators.
“It's something that you cringe at when they get into the upper level math,” she said.
(Excerpt) Read more at mlive.com ...
I’m a proponent of the Saxon math series method of learning math - you practice, and practice, and practice. So I don’t plan to let my kid use a calculator at all for arithmetic, but once she’s in Algebra and the problems are about more than adding up numbers, she’ll get a calculator. And no graphing calculator at all - if we get to calculus at home, like I expect, we’ll get access to MatLab software or something similar for really advanced problems that you can’t do on paper.
But I have the luxury of doing it the right way... lots of kids are just stuck with whatever is easiest for their teachers.
If only. What about the free breakfast and lunch I buy OTHER PEOPLES KIDS everday?
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Want to know where the ‘free breakfast’ comes from in our schools?? Burger King. Yep! We can’t even afford BK once a week for our kids at the drive-thru.
Have to add that we lived in a farming community. There wasn’t much to go around but when neighbors needed help, everyone was there to help. No bureaucrat came around to tell us what we HAD to do for others!
I don’t even have kids in school any more but this still gripes me!
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