Some teachers dig deep into their own pockets. Others strike up deals with businesses to collect leftover goods. And still others scour garage sales or Craigslist.
But Indianapolis Public Schools teacher Katie Nave found another way to stock her fifth-grade classroom with gallon bags of pencils, tubs of crayons, stacks of spiral notebooks and baskets of erasers.
She went Dumpster-diving. Outside Carmel schools.
“I guess I’m grateful that they don’t want it,” Nave said. “This is my first year when I’ve been able to give every single one of my kids every supply they would need during the school year.
“They all have scissors. They all have glue. They have things a ‘normal’ school would expect.”
It was a creative — and especially effective — method for ensuring every student had the tools to learn. How effective? Nave predicts she salvaged enough basic supplies to last through the year — and maybe even into the next.
Nave’s actions raise provocative questions about waste and inequity, but perhaps more so they are reflective of what some teachers are willing to do to give their students, especially those from impoverished neighborhoods, a better chance to succeed.
Deserving kids
Nave wrote a first-person story for The Indianapolis Star’s “Our Children, Our City” series last year, detailing the struggles of her impoverished third-grade class at School 19.
It was a plea to support IPS teachers, and the community response was stunning: Donations flooded in, and the money was used to pay for books and field trips to Conner Prairie.
“People love us. We’re famous!” Nave recalled her third-graders saying.
And Nave, who now teaches at School 63, discovered a network of allies — allies who later would alert her to unwanted stashes of new and gently used supplies.
At the end of last school year, tips started streaming in about treasures among the trash. Friends who are teachers and custodians in Carmel Clay Schools had saved discarded materials from the Dumpsters. They set aside three carloads’ worth of teachers’ and students’ castoffs for Nave, who also trolled the trash bins.
“What’s the difference between throwing it away and giving it to someone who could use it?” Nave said.
Some items were still in their original plastic shrink-wrap. Others looked barely touched — former students’ names written on the front of empty notebooks. Even the used supplies were hardly worn: already sharpened pencils or slightly blackened erasers.
“She always has pencils,” said Derrick Briscoe, 10, a student in Nave’s class. “If somebody breaks one, you can ask her to trade in. You’re gonna need them.”
In her seventh year of teaching in IPS, Nave has learned not to send her students back-to-school supply lists in the summer. Too many children show up with empty backpacks, their parents unable to afford even the basic supplies.
But this year, she placed a crayon box, pencils and a glue stick on each of her students’ desks.
“These are kids who deserve everything,” Nave said. “They deserve to have a nice life at school.”
She’s still getting to know her students, but already her fifth-graders seem aware — and angry — about conditions they may face at home.
She teaches students who wear the same clothes to school every day. Students who come to school hungry. Students who don’t want to go home at the end of the day.
But at school, Nave encourages them to earn points toward pizza parties. She brings them cupcakes when their behavior is especially good and rewards students with prizes from a treasure chest at the front of the classroom.
And her positive reinforcement approach is well-received.
“With her getting along with the kids, and the kids getting along with her, they’re going to learn a lot more,” said Reginal Williams, whose 11-year-old daughter Teajha is in Nave’s class. “She’s doing her job to the fullest — plus some.”
It’s almost part of the teacher creed, said Teresa Meredith, a Shelbyville elementary school teacher and vice president of the Indiana State Teachers Association — “an unspoken culture” to go above and beyond to provide for the needs of every child.
“It would be difficult to do what you really want to do and make lessons come alive,” she said, “without putting out a little bit of cash.
“Schools just don’t have the resources.”
The district divide
And therein always lies the root of some difficult questions. IPS receives more money per student than other districts. Shouldn’t it have money for supplies? And at a time when all school districts say they are underfunded, why are Carmel schools tossing away supplies and materials?
Carmel Clay Schools Assistant Superintendent Amy Dudley said she doesn’t know where the surplus materials may have come from — or why they were in the trash.
“I think this must have had some unique circumstances to it,” Dudley said. “The teachers are not throwing out boxes of crayons at school.”
Nave may have stumbled upon donations that Carmel schools decided they didn’t need, she said. A stack of unused assignment notebooks may have been extras from a previous year.
“If she’s using them, I’m glad they’re being put to good use,” Dudley said. “She’s very innovative. She’s getting what she needs.”
But Dudley also said there’s no formal process for collecting still-useable supplies at the end of the school year, when students and teachers clean out classrooms.
A supply drive could be incorporated into pre-existing partnerships with IPS or service learning projects, she suggested, so supplies don’t go to waste.
IPS Superintendent Eugene White praised Nave’s resourcefulness but pointed out that IPS has the revenue for basic materials such as pencils and paper — particularly because some of its wealth of Title I and special education funds can be used to buy supplies.
“Sometimes the teachers don’t know the amount of money schools have for supplies,” White said. “We have to understand what materials are available to them.”
But the real issue is probably not whether Carmel wastes classroom supplies or IPS does a good job spending its extra funding. The likely cause of this particular inequity is the means of these districts’ parents.
Suburban and township school districts tend to put more of the burden of school supplies on parents. And that works — even to excess — in districts where parents have the means.
IPS, by contrast, has the second-poorest student population in the state, White said, and parents often can’t scrounge up money for markers or other basic supplies.
That’s not to say that special efforts aren’t made to bridge the gap. White praised community organizations, for example, that run the annual Backpack Attack and stock the shelves of Teachers’ Treasures.
And in Carmel, where schools are rich with parent involvement, the generosity trickles down.
Some IPS schools benefit from fundraisers led by Carmel schools. School 54, for example, has partnered with Carmel’s Smoky Row Elementary School — and a Fishers school and local church — to receive school supplies, money for field trips, winter coats and even belts, underwear and socks.
“The kids are thrilled,” School 54 Principal Julie Bakehorn said. “I don’t know if they realize that if we didn’t give it to them, they wouldn’t have it.”
Although such partnerships and organizations undoubtedly make a difference, there always will be some schools, some classrooms, some children who don’t have everything their teacher wants for them.
And there always will be some teachers who will find new and creative ways to make up that difference.
