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Freebies lessen shameful sacrifice asked of teachers

By SUE CARLTON
Published August 22, 2005

Before I'm even out of my car, a muscled volunteer steps out of the warehouse and into the rain to ask me if I need paper. All kinds, he says, poster board for arts and crafts, whatever I need for my classroom, free.

No thanks, I tell him, I'm not a teacher - though teachers are fast pulling into parking spaces all around me.

The place is called A Gift For Teaching, a 3-year-old, nonprofit "free store" tucked into the back of an office park off Interstate 4. For teachers at some of Hillsborough's poorest schools, it's shopping day.

Once a month, they can browse through rows of donated supplies and take up to 25 items, usually about $250 worth. A Pinellas County version of the store opened last year.

Inside the brightly lit store, volunteers in striped aprons talk about how great it is to have air conditioning this year. Last year was so sweaty, they say.

Four teachers from Bing Elementary, where 86 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, get shopping carts with the blue logos of the old Eckerd Drugs and hit the displays of glue sticks, mouse pads, crayons and markers. They pick up books - The Lorax , The Principal from the Black Lagoon - examine scissors, get sheets of red foam for the kids' Christmas projects.

The jars of hand sanitizer are a hit. Hand sanitizer is often on the list of supplies students are supposed to bring to school, but because some of them don't even have shoelaces for their shoes, this doesn't always happen. The teachers put Band-Aids in their carts, too. Copy paper is also a big deal. Sometimes they run out by mid year.

Some of the teachers cruising the aisles tell me they spend $50 or more of their own money each month on supplies. Cheryl Silva, who's been teaching for 13 years, plans to make orange juice with her second-graders as part of their study of Florida. She'll be buying the cups and oranges.

Spouses, they say, can be alternately irritated about the extra spending and resigned to it. It's just part of being a teacher.

Which is not okay.

Want to hear something shameful? Our state ranks 48th in the nation for per-pupil spending, with only Mississippi and Arizona doing worse than us. Hillsborough teachers get a yearly allocation for classroom supplies, but it's not much.

So teachers devise strategies. They try to get parents to help. They become regulars at their local Dollar Stores and buy board games at Goodwill. If another teacher is about to move to a new school, they descend on her classroom, hoping to scavenge anything useful she hasn't packed.

They have friends who save them the small toys that come in McDonald's Happy Meals so they can put them in the school Treasure Box. (Students get to go to the Treasure Box for a treat after they've performed some notable feat, such as doing well on a test. Teachers say the kids who don't have much appreciate even small trinkets like that.)

Every teacher I talked to at the free store was glad it was there, happy for the chance to get what they needed, delighted with their finds. To a person, they were grateful for the generosity of donors, ranging from large corporations to small businesses to people who dropped off a few bags of things they picked up at Wal-Mart.

The store is a godsend, some of them said, and it's hard to disagree. But how maddening to need this, how infuriating that these teachers, whose starting salary is $31,000 and whose average salary in 2003-2004 was less than $39,000, should sometimes have to choose between dipping into their own pockets or going without in their classrooms.

Before she checks out, teacher Sherika Dunbar sees the desk calculators. She had gotten one on a previous trip here, a find for her math classes. She puts another calculator atop the pile in her cart.

"I try to get as many as I can," she says. "One day, I'm going to have enough for all of my students."

--Sue Carlton can be reached at carlton@sptimes.com

[Last modified August 22, 2005, 04:35:13]