Nonprofit allows teachers to ‘shop’ for free classroom supplies
November 15, 2012 at 6:00 pm in Duluth News Tribune
When Mary Beth Kjolhaug and her husband, Erick, closed their Explorations store in Billings, Mont., three years ago, the unsold classroom supplies came home with them to Duluth in a trailer.
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This is Great! I applaud these women. The reality of this is what does it say about education funding in the US? What are we a 3rd world country? What’s next is Doctors Without Borders gonna swoop in and help the 45 million uninsured?
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I think there are already groups of dentists and physicians who do pro bono work in the USA
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Yeah, good luck trying to get an appointment with one.
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This shouldn’t be happening here. This really pisses me off. With all the money and all the corporate profits. The system is broken. We can’t even educate our kids? The party that just got whacked might want to re-evaluate their beloved “values”
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You do realize this state spends over HALF its budget on education right? Half.
The show “Garage Logic” nailed it a while back. If you have a school whose budget is say….10M a year. And let’s say they whine & cry and need an extra 5M. You could give that school 50M, and the next year they’ll whine that they need 60M.
The problem isn’t how much, but how the money gets spent. You have admins & school boards with enormous egos who want to build grand visions. You have parents who either don’t care at all, or who care about the wrong things. You have teachers who are stressed out, burnt out, or who focus on teaching kids all about diversity, St. Barack, and being a good “global citizen” instead of, you know, math, science, that kind of stuff.
Then add in kids who don’t care, are so technology-dependent there’s zero common sense/critical thinking, or are so stressed out due to parental demands, and is it any wonder?
Education in MN and the US needs a giant enema, plain & simple. It needs a return to teaching the basics. not appeasing the lowest common denominator, and teaching people to actually use their brains, not regurgitate.
But yeah! Darn those companies for hoping to make a profit to ensure that they don’t end up closing! Rabble rabble rabble!!!
Hot debate. What do you think?
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The state spends half, but also how much do the schools get from the Feds, and now they will be getting close to 12% more from the sucke….. errrr… …. I mean residents of the City of Duluth. How much money does these schools need to operate, and where does it all go. We can point the finger at administration, tenured teachers, but seriously. They need to open the books, and be audited. With all money being spent, and having 45 students in a high school classroom, who sit on floors or window ledges is crap. The sucke…..eeerrrr… I mean residents of Duluth should be protesting outside the ISD 709 compound. Better idea, where is Occupy Duluth when you need them.
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I think the film Zeitgeist said it best. Your government does not want you to be educated. It does not want you to get in the way of important people by doing too much thinking. The government is getting exactly what it is paying for.
If this was an educated country, we wouldn’t have so many people like Patrick who think profiteering is just some innocent act like planting a money tree… or people who think it’s the responsibility of an antiestablishment protest group to solve our school budget problems.
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We can afford new buildings, but can’t afford to provide needed teaching materials?
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Teachers have been buying their own supplies for many years to supplement their meager supply budgets given to them by their school districts. Even to the point of buying Kleenex so the kids will have a box in the room in some cases.
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