I’m gobsmacked. Our school district offers back to school kits that you can buy at the end of the school year for the next school year. Here is the list for a 1st grader… now let’s play “The Price is NOT 🤬 Right.”
What’s the actual (are you kidding me) retail price?
@SmirkingRaven $82.99 and that’s before shipping and taxes
@MotherDucker
Whatever they charged, would it be cheaper to acquire them from the Dollar Store?
@Kittiekatt53 much much cheaper. I would never!! I could buy the kit 6 times over
@MotherDucker why does a first grader need six jumbo glue sticks in purple? Who or what are they glueing?
/sounds like the school is buying wholesale and pocketing the extra. That’s not right.
@Redskye572 they absolutely are because I checked the kindergarten list and it did not at all line up with what the teacher posted last August
@MotherDucker 4 boxes of 24 count crayons? Are they eating the other 3 boxes? The fuck?
@ProjectShadow right? We have the same single box of 64 ct crayons for the last 5 or so years—since she could hold a crayon. 😳
@ProjectShadow @MotherDucker no, all the extra stuff is for the kids whose parents cannot afford to buy school supplies at all. you can't get any of this stuff on SNAP or WIC
@redenigma @ProjectShadow sure. I totally understand that but it still seems a disproportionate amount of things, even if that is the case. Assuming each classroom has 20 students and 4 classrooms per grade level with each student bringing 50 pencils… that’s 24000 pencils for grades K-5 and our district has 3 elementary schools. That seems…. Extreme.
@redenigma @ProjectShadow funny though, when I google how many pencils a student goes through in a year it seems to jibe. Huh.
@MotherDucker @ProjectShadow it seems extreme but pencils get lost, broken or excessively sharpened to useless nubs (not that i know anything about that...) fairly quickly.
also, i think many teachers dream of only 20 kids in a classroom (when lower grades really should have a max of 15)
@redenigma @ProjectShadow of course I am also old enough to remember going to the school where my mom taught and that public school had a massive storage room full of supplies bought and paid for by the taxes that funded the district. So. There’s that level of disappointment rolled into this discourse as well.
@MotherDucker @ProjectShadow yes!
and add that teachers who spend their own money (which has in no way kept up with cost of living) to buy supplies for the classroom are only allowed to deduct something like $200 of that from their taxes...
@MotherDucker I've seen enough students, even high schoolers, destroy enough glue sticks that I was willing to let that one slide.
But fifty pencils PER STUDENT? That's just poor classroom management.
If your goal is to ensure overage for kids who don't have supplies, this is not the best way to address that.
@danialexis considering half their work is done on an iPad or Chromebook, 50 pencils is literally insane. Even 25 per student is bonkers.
@MotherDucker We require every band student to have a pencil with them every day. If the kids ordered these, the program would have nearly 10,000 pencils per year.
...We ordered 500 this year and still have about 100 in boxes.
@danialexis so this is something that’s ground my gears since the start of the year. Everyone was to send in 4 two-pocket poly plastic folders. Unlabeled with child’s name. I sent in 8 just because my mom was a teacher, so… respect. But my child has had the same green PAPER “go home” folder since August. It’s torn all to pieces. I have reinforced it with packing tape numerous times just to keep it together. It’s never once been replaced.
@MotherDucker How much are they charging for it?