[AGDee]

My kids have definitely done the "let me know the night before" thing, especially when it is that they volunteered me to bake cupcakes and I have no cupcake cups in the house. They hear about it then.

As I had said, I was not blasting the teachers. I was trying to find out if this was just our school/district, or if it was commmon. Apparently it's common. I see this more as a school district problem than anything. And, it has motivated me to get more involved in the school politics. My time is very limited and I have tried to only volunteer in capacities that allow me to spend the time directly with my kids (cub scout leader, girl scouts, soccer coach, etc.), but I definitely think that some of the items being requested should be the school's responsibility. Every bathroom in every public place or private business has soap in it. This is a basic thing. This should be true in the schools too. I am suprised that teachers themselves aren't infuriated about that. That is definitely not the teacher's fault, it is the district. I know that my school district receives $7900 per child for the year. I realize there are overhead expenses, but it seems that maybe $40 of that could be spent on supplies. I never said the teachers should be buying that stuff. I think if I were a teacher, I'd push to put soap for every classroom in the union contract!

I just did some figuring...

$7900 per student x 25 students per class= 197,500 per classroom.
Teacher's salary + benefits (usually add 19% of salary for benefits)= (average, based on Master's Degreed teachers in Michigan)=$75,000
If they are providing nothing but toilet paper and dry erase markers/erasers to a classroom, then they can't be spending more than $300 a year on supplies.

That leaves $122,200 per classroom per year x 20 classrooms per school = 2,444,000. And that leads to my questions.. where is this money going???? I'm just going to have to find out.

Dee

ETA: The more I read responses, the more I think teachers and parents should UNITE against whoever does the school budgets and say "HEY! Buy paper, pencils and SOAP, this is a school!"

Also, I guess having to buy supplies surprises me, because I never had to have supplies in elementary school. I remember buying notebooks and folders in high school, but not in elementary. We used those big fat pencils and the paper with the huge lines and used community crayons and shared scissors. And we used that paste that you had to apply with a stick. Remember that stuff? Some kids ate it. And, I don't complain about the request for glue sticks, I wouldn't want kids using the gooey oozy elmer's if I were a teacher.