Funding our Teachers
I come from a long line of educators. My wife is a public school teacher. My mother is a public middle school principal. My father taught and coached in public schools for 18 years. I have aunts and uncles who are teachers.
I know, first hand, several teachers who spend hundreds of their own dollars every year to purchase supplies and equipment for their classrooms. They don’t do this because they have extra money lying around, they do it because they care and want our children to have the best possible educational experience. We must do everything in our power to give them the tools, the resources, and the support they need to be able to prepare our children for a prosperous future.
Some compare our teachers to our fighting men and women. If we don’t give them the tools they need to fight the battles, how are we ever going to win the war? The same holds true of our teachers. If we don’t give them the tools, resources, and support they need to teach, we can’t expect our children to learn, prosper, and excel.
We hear a lot of talk about surplus lottery money and how it should be used to improve education. Most of the ideas that have been talked about are excellent, but very few do much to help K-12 education in our state. I have a plan that will allow some of that surplus to be set aside to help teachers get the supplies and tools they need without having to spend their own money to do it.
This plan would take a portion of the lottery surplus and set it aside in an endowment. This endowment would be under the control of the Tennessee Department of Education and would allow for direct funding of grants to teachers. These grants could be used to help fund additional training for teachers as well as buy supplies and equipment that are needed in our classrooms. Because this program would be administered at the state level and would allow teachers to apply for funding directly, it would eliminate much of the red tape at the local level where training, equipment, and supply dollars are increasingly becoming harder and harder to fit into the budget.
Sure there will be limitations on the amount of each grant, the number of grants awarded, and the type of training, equipment, and supplies that can be purchased, but it is a good starting point.
There is no better way to impact the education of our children but through their teachers.