Skip to main content

School Teachers Begging for Basics

What if a hospital’s administrators regularly told surgeons to make do without bandages, with dull scalpels, and little to no anesthetic while claiming tight finances? With all the money hospitals have, there would be questions about the administrators’ competence and possibly audits to look for malfeasance. Something like this needs to happen at Oklahoma City Public Schools.

My wife is a teacher working in the Oklahoma City Public Schools (OKCPS) system. Last year, she came home telling me how there was no paper available for the notoriously few and regularly broken, undersupplied duplicating machines at her school. What’s more, there was no plan for the district to provide any. In the past, she was told, a parent had donated paper to that particular campus, but that parent had transferred his child to a private school. The school had surplus paper from previous years, but that was gone. There were no plans for the district to provide more.

Now, I am well aware that education funding has suffered an actual setback in this state (as opposed to a mere slow-down in the more normal regular increases in funding decade over decade). I would expect school districts to curb their purchases of some types of equipment, allow class sizes to climb a bit, and even let a few needed repairs slide. But paper? How are teachers to give exams? How are they to supplement textbooks? How are they to give out written homework assignments? You can’t just run out of paper one day and <poof> declare yourself paperless.

My wife solved the paperless problem by posting a request for donations to pay for paper on DonorsChoose.org. That is, she went begging – for charity – for paper – for something fundamental to getting her job done – to educate kids – in a taxpayer-funded school – which is supposed to be about educating kids.

Now, you might think I’m getting ready to complain about a lamentable lack of funding – you know, “underfunding” – of our neglected public schools, especially the urban ones. But I’m not. Actually, I’m outraged that OKCPS forces its teachers to beg for basic necessities that I know for a fact it can afford without a problem. After all, our big urban districts are among the bigger spending districts in the state.

We at the 1889 Institute decided to investigate whether there were other teachers begging for basics. DonorsChoose.org is a website where teachers post requests for donations to fund material classroom wants and needs. Anyone can donate and target specific districts or classrooms as one wishes. On August 22nd this year, we looked at all the solicitations for funds by OKCPS teachers posted that day. We found $34,000 in solicitations for what we judged as necessities. These are published, with teacher names redacted, in our report, Why Are OKCPS Teachers Begging the Public for Basics?

To be sure, though we did not count them or add them up, a much larger proportion of solicitations were for what we deemed unessential items (though our standard for essential was pretty strict, giving the benefit of the doubt to OKCPS). These non-essentials included lots of requests for “flexible seating” and carpet for “cozy corners” in elementary classrooms. Most requests for computers were deemed non-essential, as were a number of requests for class sets of specific novels. We just don’t have the information to know if these were essentials.

But, clearly essential is basic furniture for elementary students to have a place to put their coats. Frogs to dissect seem pretty essential, too. So do class sets of dictionaries. One request was for a bulb for a district-provided PowerPoint projector. Basics for using whiteboards, we judged, were essential, as were printers, ink, and toner when the teacher specifically mentioned copiers and printers constantly being broken or out of supplies. School districts all over the nation get extra funding for AP courses, but at one campus teachers had to go begging for AP test prep materials. There was one costly request for – get this – chairs. The elementary school had chairs in the library, but they were too big for the appropriately-sized tables in the room! And, we did deem some $6,500 in requests for computers to be necessities. They were for a handful per classroom to prepare kids for required tests that they would have to take on computers.

So, how do I know OKCPS can afford these essentials? Well, as noted in our paper, when all funds are accounted for, OKCPS spends 12 percent more per student than the statewide average. If you count only those funds that are categorized as spent on “Instruction” and “Support Services” OKCPS spends over 8 percent more than the statewide average. More than triple that difference, and you get how much more OKCPS spends than the Piedmont district, whose teachers posted no Donors Choose requests for essentials. And, as with every other time I’ve calculated how much funding each classroom represents, it’s difficult to figure out where all the money can possibly be going.

So, why are OKCPS teachers forced to go begging? The answer is that I haven’t the slightest idea. What I do know is that it’s not for lack of funding for OKCPS. There is plenty of money for the necessities of education, including speakers for smart boards already paid for and installed by the district. The problem, clearly, and the only explanation with lack of funding not it, is lack of proper prioritization. For all the lip service given to the need to support teachers in their classrooms, actions speak louder than words. No doubt, central district offices have paper and machines that work. Clearly, it’s more important to have a big fat bureaucracy (which likely simply cannot be managed well) and excuses to scream for more money from the legislature than it is to make sure education practitioners (teachers) have the basics they need to get the job done.

Byron Schlomach is Director of the 1889 Institute and can be reached at bschlomach@1889institute.org.

The opinions expressed in this blog are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the official position of 1889 Institute.


Popular posts from this blog

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Carbon Dioxide

When I was a young child, I remember speculating with my school classmates about how close a nuclear bomb blast might occur if there were all-out nuclear war with the Soviet Union. I grew up about 25 miles from Sheppard Air Force Base , which we all assumed was a potential target of the Soviets. It was an odd, concerning feeling deep in the gut, to contemplate the possibility of suffering radiation poisoning and the end of the world. I wouldn’t wish that feeling on anyone, certainly not little kids, that gnawing deep-down fear that occasionally welled up depending on the news. That’s partly why the fear-mongering over global warming is more than just an aggravation to me. It makes me angry that propagandists like Al Gore have so frightened kids about the future that one has turned herself into an advertisement for depression treatment and anger management . I am especially angry because the truth about climate and carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) is the opposite of what the mainstream news ...
Read more

Educational Choice: A Simple Solution to School Inadequacy

To put it mildly, 2020 has not been the year everyone hoped for. Between the “ mostly peaceful ” riots, calls for the reduction or abolition of police departments, and the discord over how to handle Covid-19, our institutions are in disarray. Most school districts are a mess. Many were caught with no plan for the fall semester, while others lacked a good plan. For example, Stillwater Public Schools implemented a system that only added to the uncertainty and stress.   The Stillwater plan was to attempt in-person education, but re-evaluate that decision each Friday based on an arbitrarily defined range of area-reported Covid cases. The Friday after school started, the Stillwater district announced it would have classes the next week. Then, on Sunday afternoon, district administrators made a second announcement suspending in-person learning for the upcoming week, forcing parents to make new plans for their children within a very short window of time. The district has yet to resume i...
Read more

OKC Public Schools Elevating a Privileged Elite over Oklahoma Taxpayers

The hypocrisy of the Soviet Union’s pretense of egalitarianism was well known enough to be the subject of mockery and parody. Ronald Reagan never tired of the jokes . Soviet communism espoused equality, but the reality is that party apparatchiks and government officials enjoyed special perks that no one else had access to. This special class wasn’t officially paid much more than the average skilled worker, but enjoyed privileges like dachas on the coast or countryside, special stores with imported goods and without the endless lines that were commonplace everywhere else, and more advanced medical treatment. For all their talk about eliminating class distinctions, the Soviet nomenklatura —those “doing the people’s work”—could feather their nest with the best of ‘em. Apparently, a similar attitude reigns in our government schools. Our friends at OCPA report that Oklahoma City Public Schools (OKCPS) will not offer in-person instruction to students for the first nine weeks of school this ...
Read more

Present Reforms to Keep the Ghost of State Questions Past from Creating Future Headaches

Oklahoma, like many western states, allows its citizens to directly participate in the democratic process through citizen initiatives and referendums. In a referendum, the legislature directs a question to the people — usually to modify the state constitution, since the legislature can change statutes itself. An initiative requires no legislative involvement, but is initiated by the people via signature gathering, and can be used to modify statute or amend the constitution. Collectively, the initiatives and referendums that make it onto the ballot are known as State Questions.   Recently, there have been calls to make it more difficult to amend the constitution. At least two proposals are being discussed. One would diversify the signature requirement by demanding that a proportional amount of signatures come from each region of the state. The other would require a sixty percent majority to adopt a constitutional amendment rather than the fifty percent plus one currently in place. ...
Read more