school supplies!

toypup wrote:


"Ericka Kammerer" wrote in message
news
toypup wrote:

If a business gives a needed supply, I think it should be
appreciated. Sure, it's good publicity for them, but it is a generous
offer. We shouldn't be grubbing for "what about this? what about
that?" That's a good way to discourage donations altogether. We use
the money we save from the donation for this and that. If the
donation isn't needed, turn it down and make suggestions for
alternatives.

It is true that gifts should be appreciated. It is also
true that givers should be thoughtful.

Yes, but they are thoughtful when they give something that is useful for
the school and the school needs. Just because they also need books and
pencils and paper doesn't mean it's the company's job to go out and get
that, too, since they were kind enough to supply computers. Now, I'm
plenty sure they think the school needs computers. I'd think so, as an
outsider, and they are probably seeing it like I do. If the school
doesn't need it, they can turn it down. It's not like the company came
by and presented 30 live horses.

Yes, but there are degrees of thoughtfulness as well.
While it may look good to make the big, high tech donations,
if a school is struggling to meet basic needs, it *would* be
more of a kindness to set up a program to address those needs
before delivering something that is nice, but a luxury that
becomes less relevant when students aren't even having basic
needs met. It's also not all that thoughtful to give something
that the recipient does not have the wherewithal to maintain.
If they can't maintain it, then the gift will be useless in
very short order.

Best wishes,
Ericka

Anne Rogers wrote:

I certainly relate to the dance stories, but in my
opinion, it ought to be self-evident that pretty much any
activity has stuff you need to know if you're going to pursue
it seriously, and that means you have to read the material
provided, attend the orientations scheduled, ask questions
when something is unclear, and so forth.

Though on the otherhand, you are clearly very bright, it's entirely
possible that it being self-evident that questions need to be asked or
information obtained just isn't a place that a certain percentage of the
population is aware of, just because you know and I know doesn't make
Joe Bloggs understand that concept.

It's true it's not necessarily obvious in a vacuum what
questions you need to ask, but, for example, if you get a
handbook that says that the class dress code for boys is
black shorts, white shirt, white socks, black shoes and a
dance belt and you don't know what a dance belt is, I don't
think it's asking too much to suggest that one ought to ask
someone at the school what a dance belt is (or google it, or
whatever) ;-) And, I don't think it's too much to ask that
if a handbook is send to you (more than once, in paper and
electronic form) and you're asked to attend an orientation
(with several dates available) that perhaps you ought to read
the handbook and attend the orientation, instead of showing up
for class in something that doesn't meet dress code and then
complaining that no one told you what you were supposed to be
wearing ;-) And what is it with dance and underwear? We have
a heck of a time getting boys in dance belts and getting girls
to stop wearing panties under their leotards, no matter how
many signs we put up, notices in the handbook, mentions at
orientations, and so forth. And honestly, is it rocket
science to suggest to folks that they ought to change to
street clothes before leaving the studio rather than taking
their young girls out and parading them down the street
scantily clad in their dancewear?! Or that even the
preschool aged girls ought to be changed in the dressing
room, rather than stripped naked in public areas to change
for class? Yeesh.

I agree that there are lots of complicated systems
out there where it's hard slogging to figure out what you
need to know, and I also agree that some organizations are
completely inept at putting out information. My point was
merely that having good information available (or even
foisted upon folks) isn't enough to get the job done.
There remain those people who simply aren't willing or able
to put in even minimal effort, and at some point you just
have to throw up your hands and say you've done all you
can and deal with the raging parent who's upset at encountering
an issue that would have been prevented if she'd bothered
to read or listen to the information sent her way on several
different occasions and in several different formats ;-)
So, while poor communication pretty much guarantees lack of
conformance, lack of conformance doesn't necessarily indicate
poor communication.

Best wishes,
Ericka

Anne Rogers wrote:

It's not very challenging at all. A good while before
the activity requiring the supplies you send home a note that
says the class is collecting pizza boxes for a project and
asking folks to send in whatever pizza boxes they have. When
the required number have been collected, send another note home
saying mission accomplished. Problem solved. You just have to
plan ahead.

Good in theory, but would you honestly get your donation there as
willingly and as quickly if you knew it was just going towards a general
total, rather than having the pressure of possibly on that day if you
didn't send the child with the relevant thing that they would be upset
at being left out - if I'm the only parent that would in practice end up
behaving like that then your system would work, I may well have a unique
personality trait, but I doubt it.

It seems to work well at our school, given a respectable
amount of lead time, both at a classroom level and at a school-wide
level. It's true that any individual parent may or may not send
in a pizza box or shoe box or whatever, but on the other hand,
there are the parents who will save the pizza boxes from the birthday
party or decide it's time to declutter all the shoe boxes they
never got around to throwing away, so it all seems to work out in
the end. The 5th grade team at our elementary school does a lot
of projects, and they do them almost entirely at school, so they
solicit parents for donations to their project supplies. They
send home a list of the sorts of things they find handy (hot glue
sticks, fabric/yarn/wood scraps, small boxes, clay, egg cartons,
small figures, etc., etc., etc.). Some parents have tons of this
stuff lying about, others run out and purchase stuff (which they're
told not to do), and others send nothing. It all works out in the
end.

I do think that this sort of thing is much more
difficult to accomplish in a school where a good proportion
of the students come from economically disadvantaged homes,
but otherwise I think it's likely to succeed.

Best wishes,
Ericka

Anne Rogers wrote:

I don't either - and I'm not giving her a hard time. I'm also not
talking about asking a work colleague or neighbor. But if a person
(especially someone from another country) asks an American realtor or
mortgage company rep something to the effect of, "Does it matter how
much we put down?" I find it astounding that none of those people
would mention PMI. I don't know what else Anne could reasonably have
done to drag the information out of them if she didn't know the
information was there to be dragged.

Clisby, don't worry about giving me a hard time, I certainly didn't
think that of you and I doubt toypup did either. But you're right,
knowing what I know now I do find it quite stunning that we really
didn't manage to drag it out of anyone, I don't think we even managed to
get a hint of 20% being a cut off point of getting a better deal, let
alone it being a point where we could find we actually couldn't even get
a mortgage - which is essential knowledge and could have completely
changed our plans, I do feel as if everyone we were involved with was in
it for what they could get out of it and that as my husband's employer
offered us significant benefits to use one of two loan companies and one
real estate agency, we felt that they had failed in there
responsibilities to new hires.

I think the company has grown so large that it's lost some of the
oversight that a smaller company has, it's very easy for something very
significant to happen a lot of layers down from top management. For
example, today, I got an email saying that if I had used the health
website to do anything that I needed to print it all out because they
were changing providers in 3 weeks time, I haven't really used it, but
we've been bomarded with encouragement to set up individual profiles and
health records and take questionnaires and what not, I suspect that the
two clashing things have come from them being things dealt with my
seperate areas and no one person having oversight - the encouragement to
fill profiles and what not in probably comes from the financial side,
with the idea of education and health living cutting insurance costs,
but what the engine behind the website is is probably a different
persons resonsiblity with different motivating factors - which is all
getting rather off topic, but it illustrates some of the challenges of
working for a large company that pretty much drives the economy of the
area.

Cheers
Anne


Well, just as a personal example of realtors/mortage reps not being as
forthcoming as I'd have liked:

I grew up on the coast of South Carolina. I know about hurricanes.
However, when my husband and I moved from Atlanta to Charleston in 2004
and started house-hunting, that was the first time I had tried to buy a
house in this area.

Did it occur to me to say, "Hey, how does the Atlantic storm season
affect my ability to buy a house?" No, it didn't. Did anybody mention
that to us? No. Not, that is, until we had pre-approval on our loan
and signed a contract to buy a house (in August 2005). THEN we hear
from every side: "Hurry up and arrange homeowners insurance - any time
there's a named storm in the Atlantic, the insurance companies will
declare a moratorium on new homeowners' policies here." Since
homeowners insurance is required in order to get the loan, that's ...
good to know. And no, this wasn't fear-mongering. This is what
happens along the coast when there's a named Atlantic storm - doesn't
have to be a hurricane.

Luckily, there wasn't much storm activity that August, so our closing
went ahead OK. Along the way, at least a dozen people (realtors,
mortgage company folks, insurance company reps) told us about all the
closings that had to be canceled the year before, because there was no
way to get homeowners insurance.

If I had known that ahead of time, I probably would have avoided
August-October for house-hunting.

Clisby

"Michelle J. Haines" wrote:

Rosalie B. wrote:

I don't think the school expects the parents to buy extra. I think it
is more of a hope that someone will come through.

I think you should meet the teachers at this school, then.

I would probably react like you then.

I've never gotten anything like that, nor have I ever sent anything
out like that.

We have gotten a letter like that from every one of these teachers,
except the fifth grade teacher last year. "Here are the parties you are
expected to help with, you may choose your preference and I will assign
you one. It is your responsibility to contact the other parents
assigned to your party and make arrangements."

I would just say no that I wasn't going to do it, and probably also
say that the kids should be in school to learn and not attend parties.
And then I would not do it. If it isn't a private school, then I
doubt they would actually refuse to let your kid attend school. If I
wasn't new in the community, I bet I could find other parents who felt
the same way, and I would join the PTA and try to influence the school
to stop this. I might right a letter to the paper about why the
school kids were having parties instead of doing their lessons.

Uh.....

Why do you think quantifying the basis for outrage is important. If
the parent us upset, the reason for the anger and whether it is
justified doesn't have much if anything to do with their actual
behavior.

Um, I'm sorry, I think it does. Complaining about a ruler seems rather
silly (although circumstances back then were different, I dunno, but
still, every child must use the metric system now)...however,
This was in 1980

complaining to the principal because the music teacher said to my son in
class "Your parents say you're supposed to be smart? I just don't see
it." Yes, I have justification to be a bit irritated.

I didn't say you didn't have justification. What I said was that a
parent's reaction isn't necessarily BASED on whether their reaction is
justified.

The reason the principal was annoyed with me was because he hadn't
realized that the ruler was on the list (although it had gone through
his office - he just hadn't looked at it) so when an irate parent came
in, he was made to look bad. That was, of course, My Fault.

I had a similar thing happen to my ds, except I didn't find out about
it until years later. The first time any of my children had an
elementary school teacher that had also taught an older sibling was
when my son (the youngest) was in second grade and his older sister
was in fifth grade. (That's because we moved about every 2 years and
the kids were all at least 2 years apart).

I was worried about my dd#3 because her older sister had made a bad
enemy of the teacher by proving her definitively wrong about some math
problems where the teacher's manual had the wrong answer. I need not
have worried - dd#3 was the teacher's pet.

What I didn't know was that at the beginning of the year, the second
grade teacher handed my ds a report done by dd#3 and said "This is the
kind of work I expect from you". That was the year that he spent
playing hooky and doing everything he could to get out of going to
school.

"Donna Metler" wrote in message
. ..
And believe me, we were grateful. However, the problem comes when people,
like yourself, see the media coverage of "X elementary got $25,000 from
VH1/Time Warner to start a band program" and automatically assume that
this means that there's $25,000 to spend on other stuff-like, say, paper
and crayons.

There isn't. There wasn't more than $250 discretionary funds in the budget
for the entire music program for an 800 student school (and the same was
true for every classroom). The budgeted funds paid for my salary, and that
was it.

But then then school did not need to pay for instruments out of that $250.
They could use it to pay your salary. If they didn't have the instruments,
they wouldn't have a class, right?

"Rosalie B." wrote in message
...
"toypup" wrote:

"Ericka Kammerer" wrote in message
news
toypup wrote:

If a business gives a needed supply, I think it should be appreciated.
Sure, it's good publicity for them, but it is a generous offer. We
shouldn't be grubbing for "what about this? what about that?" That's
a
good way to discourage donations altogether. We use the money we save
from the donation for this and that. If the donation isn't needed,
turn
it down and make suggestions for alternatives.

It is true that gifts should be appreciated. It is also
true that givers should be thoughtful.

Yes, but they are thoughtful when they give something that is useful for
the
school and the school needs. Just because they also need books and
pencils
and paper doesn't mean it's the company's job to go out and get that, too,
since they were kind enough to supply computers. Now, I'm plenty sure
they
think the school needs computers. I'd think so, as an outsider, and they
are probably seeing it like I do. If the school doesn't need it, they can
turn it down. It's not like the company came by and presented 30 live
horses.

I don't think the school would ever turn it down even if they didn't
need or want the computers (or the 30 live horses) and had not
intended to have any. It would be massively bad publicity for them
because probably the company donating would want the GOOD publicity
for their generosity, and not getting it would make them angry. And
they would tell the papers etc etc and then the taxpayers would be
outraged etc.

I'm pretty sure they could turn down 30 live horses and not get bad
publicity.

"toypup" wrote in message
...


"Donna Metler" wrote in message
. ..
And believe me, we were grateful. However, the problem comes when people,
like yourself, see the media coverage of "X elementary got $25,000 from
VH1/Time Warner to start a band program" and automatically assume that
this means that there's $25,000 to spend on other stuff-like, say, paper
and crayons.

There isn't. There wasn't more than $250 discretionary funds in the
budget for the entire music program for an 800 student school (and the
same was true for every classroom). The budgeted funds paid for my
salary, and that was it.

But then then school did not need to pay for instruments out of that $250.
They could use it to pay your salary. If they didn't have the
instruments, they wouldn't have a class, right?
$250 for an 800 student school barely covers photocopy paper and printer
cartridges for a year. It might, if you're lucky, replace broken rhythm
sticks and drum heads that are just part of the package when you're teaching
800 children from ages 4-12. I was already on salary to teach 22 general
music classes and choir. When we got band, it just replaced a few sections
of grade 4, 5, and 6 music, with the kids who wanted to do band scheduled
for those sections instead of general music.

A single Clarinet reed is about $1, even buying in bulk. Beginning
clarinetists go through about one a week. Saxophone reeds cost more. Typical
maintenance on a band instrument is at least $50/yr, with repairs costing
more than that.

Bottom line, that $25,000 grant probably really needed at least $2500 a year
to maintain the instruments and support the program-and it wasn't available.

Rosalie B. wrote:

I would just say no that I wasn't going to do it, and probably also
say that the kids should be in school to learn and not attend parties.
And then I would not do it. If it isn't a private school, then I
doubt they would actually refuse to let your kid attend school. If I
wasn't new in the community, I bet I could find other parents who felt
the same way, and I would join the PTA and try to influence the school
to stop this. I might right a letter to the paper about why the
school kids were having parties instead of doing their lessons.

It's a bit hard to get too argumentative in some cases, the situation is
complicated by the fact that my MIL taught at this school for 30 years.
And they also get their backs up about us somewhat fast BECAUSE we're
ex-homeschoolers, I think. Maybe that's because AS ex-homeschoolers, we
don't have much awe of teachers. I remember in our former school, the
secretary got quite irritated at my husband because he refered to the
principal by his first name. *gasp* Of course, my husband had met the
principal socially and had spoken to him and was introduced to him by
his first name, but when he told the secretary, "I'd like to leave a
message for George." she very pointedly said, "I think you mean MR.
KOFFMAN!"

Whatever.

What I didn't know was that at the beginning of the year, the second
grade teacher handed my ds a report done by dd#3 and said "This is the
kind of work I expect from you". That was the year that he spent
playing hooky and doing everything he could to get out of going to
school.

Ug. One of the selfless martyrs of education, struggling along out of
the sole desire to encourage young minds, no doubt. *makes a disgusted
noise*

Michelle
Flutist

"Michelle J. Haines" wrote:

Rosalie B. wrote:

I would just say no that I wasn't going to do it, and probably also
say that the kids should be in school to learn and not attend parties.
And then I would not do it. If it isn't a private school, then I
doubt they would actually refuse to let your kid attend school. If I
wasn't new in the community, I bet I could find other parents who felt
the same way, and I would join the PTA and try to influence the school
to stop this. I might right a letter to the paper about why the
school kids were having parties instead of doing their lessons.

It's a bit hard to get too argumentative in some cases, the situation is
complicated by the fact that my MIL taught at this school for 30 years.

I agree with that - if you MIL is respected, it's better to stay on
her side of things, and not make too many waves.

And they also get their backs up about us somewhat fast BECAUSE we're
ex-homeschoolers, I think. Maybe that's because AS ex-homeschoolers, we
don't have much awe of teachers. I remember in our former school, the
secretary got quite irritated at my husband because he refered to the
principal by his first name. *gasp* Of course, my husband had met the
principal socially and had spoken to him and was introduced to him by
his first name, but when he told the secretary, "I'd like to leave a
message for George." she very pointedly said, "I think you mean MR.
KOFFMAN!"

I think the secretary was just being a PITA (or substitute your
pejorative of choice)

My principal that had such a problem with the metric ruler was also
named George.

Whatever.

What I didn't know was that at the beginning of the year, the second
grade teacher handed my ds a report done by dd#3 and said "This is the
kind of work I expect from you". That was the year that he spent
playing hooky and doing everything he could to get out of going to
school.

Ug. One of the selfless martyrs of education, struggling along out of
the sole desire to encourage young minds, no doubt. *makes a disgusted
noise*

I didn't learn this until my ds was married and had children of his
own. I knew there must be some reason that he was running away, but I
could never get him to tell me, and the teacher also denied having any
problems with him. She said he wasn't a behavior problem and that
they got along fine. And I guess from her perspective, they did.