School Supplies

"All classroom materials are community materials. This means that all supplies brought to school are for all students in share in the classroom. I am the queen of the room and I will disperse the supplies as I see fit. You have an eraser on the end of the pencil you don't need the green one that you brought with you the first day of school. You have crayons in your desk. I know that you do because I put them there. You may not use the markers that you brought to school. I want you to use crayons for this assignment."

The above are some of the things that I said today. The school sent a letter to every student before school started. It told the families who their teachers would be this year and what classroom supplies were needed. It also stated the part about shared supplies.

I received two letters from parents today. One was very nice and wanted to know if I could return the pencil box that the child had accidentally brought to school. It was supposed to be for personal use and the parent wondered, if I had time, if it could be returned. I still think that it's bull crap but at least the parent was nice about it.

The other parent was not so nice about it. They wanted to know why I took their child's stuff. I need to give it back. It's their child's stuff. It's a great way to start a conversation.

Many other children told me about what their Momma said. They are supposed to get their stuff back. It's theirs. They want it back. Notice the trend here.

I'm not going to give the supplies back. I gave back the pencil boxes but I did that because I really didn't have a need for them. I'm not backing down on this one. I'm sorry but the supplies only cost a couple of dollars. One of the other teachers actually calculated the price at under $2 with all of the sales.

It cost me more than that to go out and buy the supplies that I did for each of the students. I bought basic supplies for 25 kids. Crayons, pencils, scissors, 5 folders, 5 spiral notebooks, pencil boxes for each individual child. Each one of them had these in their desk at the beginning of the day on the first day of school. I also bought an assortment of other things like soap, paper towels, markers, tissues and lots of other stuff. I'm not trying to make a big deal about this but come on.

Is this the first interaction that you want to have with your child's teacher?