teaching tuesday: school supplies

The other day, my friend from my hometown posted this article from The Star Tribune about how Minnesota schools' supply lists are getting a little out of hand.

This is frustrating because she is not in Minnesota and I am.
This is also frustrating because she is a parent and I am a teacher.
We are two advocates that have the same end goal with different understandings of how to get there.

I got pretty worked up about this article, which is mildly absurd considering my school doesn't have any kind of requirements like that (iTunes gift cards? headphones? name-brand supplies?) and generally speaking, the school supply needs in high school are pretty basic: notebook, folder, writing utensil. Honestly, sometimes students complete assignments for me in marker when I am all out of pencils to give to them. Whatever, man, as long as the student can prove to me that they are learning.  (Usually, when given that option, they quickly borrow a pencil from someone. Weird how that works.)

I think I also was riled because our school works pretty hard to meet the needs of students. We have a food shelf inside our school that stays stocked year round with groceries, school supplies, personal care items, and more.

Today, I sat outside the food shelf during registration so that every family that came by knew that this resource was available to students. We started doing this last year and saw a large increase in the number and diversity of students accessing the shelf. There were 160 visits to our food shelf in the first four days of school alone. The weekly visit number stayed fairly high like that for the entire month of September.

I have a pretty energetic sales pitch about the food shelf. And yes, most parents thought I was a student.

I am the co-coordinator of the food shelf with another staff member. She is the logistics to my hopes and dreams.  It would be far too much to run it on my own and I'm thankful our school believes the shelf is important enough to have two staff members work on it. Honestly, I'm pretty sure she does most of the work.

We went back-to-school shopping in early July after receiving a monetary donation.
This year we started buying socks! That's my new hope & dream for the food shelf.*

Just yesterday, a business (who wants no publicity for the donations) hosted their second annual backpack packing event for us. 40 high-quality, high-school-student-sized backpacks were packed for us, plus 10 reusable grocery bags on top of that, plus we were also given multiple boxes of notebooks, more bags, and other things.  This is a huge partnership for us, as it allows us to start the school year off really well. I honestly can't tell you how many backpacks we go through in a school year, but it's a lot, and it's a fairly constant need.

So many great backpacks! We already gave out nearly 1/4 of these today.
They've also been nicely displayed since this photo was taken.

The lady who organizes this backpack donation is the parent of a former student who graduated a couple of years ago -- she learned of the food shelf and decided that we were a worthwhile recipient of their community service. She worked with us to create a very tailored shopping list for the backpacks that they pack for us. Today, I gave the "Top 10 Needs" list out to a parent and this afternoon I happened to be in the office when she came back with 7+ bags of food and toiletries to donate to us. She was actually upset when she realized there was something on the list she forgot to purchase. We have an incredibly supportive community, which is great because our needs keep growing. In a lot of ways, it's actually really easy to run the food shelf because businesses and people keep hearing about us and they contact us about how they can help. It's a little surreal.

The food shelf is probably the thing I'm most proud of that our school does in trying to level the playing field for all students. There are a lot of incredible teachers in our school that are doing a lot of good -- I repeat, good, impactful, long-lasting, life-changing -- work, but sometimes the grand scheme of education and how deeply it can/will ultimately impact students -- all of that good work teachers are doing -- can seem so intangible to the students in the day-to-day grind when there's not enough food at home or school supplies are too expensive or there are just all of these little signs that you don't quite fit in. Our school is able to give students an opportunity to get what they need for their futures in the classroom and out. And that's pretty special.

So, Star Tribune, while you choose to focus on the negatives that come with the beginning of the academic year (when schools are just trying pretty hard to give students a bright future even when it requires more and more stuff in a technologically advancing world), I'm going to be outside the food shelf, squealing like it's Christmas morning** as donations come in and students' eyes light up at the cool new backpack they found.



* I might be Dumbledore.
**This is really not much of an exaggeration of my standard behavior. My co-coordinator is also the calmer of the two of us, and thus why people probably think I'm a student volunteer. I have accepted this.