School is about to begin and the Back to School sales at Target will be irresistible. How can you help your local schools? Think about picking up a few extra items for your local school! Teachers spend a ton of their own money (hundreds of dollars), and picking up a few extra items can help ease this burden.
As I was looking through old pictures and interviewing my grandmother about her times in college and being a teacher, I ran across this list, which I am reprinting almost word for word, with a couple of added notes. Not much has changed:
Teacher’s Wishing Well
Do you have supplies/materials that you don’t need anymore? Don’t send them to the landfill! These materials are valuable resources that can be used in local classrooms to benefit the children of Manatee County [Note: or your own county.] If you have some of the following items or anything else you’d like to donate, please bring then to the church office [Note or directly to your own local school!]
Class and Office Supplies
- Binders
- Calculators
- Clipboards
- Colored pencils
- Construction paper
- Copy paper
- Dry erase markers
- Envelopes
- Erasers
- File Folders
- Filler paper
- Folders
- Glue
- Highlighters
- Hole punch
- Index cards
- Magnets
- Markers
- Notebooks
- Paper
- Paper clips
- Pens (Blue/black ink)
- Post It notes
- Staplers
- Scissors
- Tape
Miscellaneous
- Backpacks
- Beads
- Buttons
- Books
- Lunch Boxes
- Magazines
- Paper towels
- Puzzles
- Stickers
- Story Books
- Tissues
- Telephone wire
- Toothpicks
- Wine corks
Arts & Crafts
- Baby Food jars
- Clay
- Crayons
- Felt
- Film containers
- Finger paint
- Grocery bags
- Paint brushes
- Popsicle sticks
- Paper towel or toilet paper rolls
- Sand paper
- Sidewalk chalk
- Straws
- Egg cartons
- Yarn
- Ziploc baggies
What else can you do?
If you don’t have supplies to donate but want to help, there are other organizations you can support:
On this site you can see wish lists for over 25,000 schools – enter your zip code to find your school or a local one. They have individual school wish lists posted here and you can donate the items that they need the most.
You can support a specific school or town through their posted wish lists. Enter your state and choose a town to support.
Local School Websites
Some schools have their own website and put the wish lists there. Take a look at your local school’s website to see if they have their own wish list posted. For our local school – see the San Carlos Charter Learning Center website.
There are specific organizations that support their local schools, such as Education Foundations (our local one is scefkids.org or other types of organizations. Here is an example of one in Hawaii that is supporting its’ schools.
My favorite organization to support classroom needs is Donors Choose. Teachers post their project for which they need support and donors can choose what they want to support and how. You can specify what you want to support – the most urgent, the lowest cost, the highest poverty, the fewest days left to fund, or the projects with the most donors. Every once in a while a company, like Google, will pay for it all and clear out the wish lists! It is always heartening to hear how and what can help!
There are many ways you can help teachers and their efforts!
