Hey :o) I have a question about being a teacher in the US. I remember you saying you and your colleagues had to buy supplies for the students to use (like hand sanitiser during Covid - I hope I'm remembering right). I heard schools are almost run by parents' boards who have the last say about everything, which might be a caricature? But my question is, if teachers didn't buy the supplies the school (/state) should, and parents saw that their kids didn't have those supplies, could they force the school/state to step up and buy what's needed?
Good question. American school districts* are run by school boards (and also by school administrators), and being a school board member is an elected position. A lot of school board members do tend to be people whose kids are or were in that school district, but it isn't a requirement. The short answer to your question is that, if a school board thinks that the schools should be spending more money on providing supplies for students, they can absolutely increase that line item on the budget, though it means that they'll have to take that money from somewhere else. And if the parents don't like that the school district isn't providing enough supplies for students, they can voice their concerns (either individually or collectively, the latter of which will definitely be more effective) at one or more school board meetings, which may or may not lead to change depending on things like the school district's budget, the school board members' priorities, and the persistence of the parents in question. In reality, though, the culture is such that parents are more likely to just blame the teacher(s) or blame the school (which generally circles back around to "blaming the teacher"), because it's largely expected that teachers will just purchase the supplies out of their own pockets (as well as solicit donations from student families, with results varying based on the affluence of the student population), and most of them do.
Also schools overall did do better with providing things like hand sanitizer and cleaning supplies during Covid, but that didn't necessarily continue once pandemic precautions were lifted. And not all schools stepped up (or stepped up enough) in that regard.
*At least as far as I know--in America, schools are mostly under the authority of state governments rather than the federal government, which means that we really have 50+ different school systems in this country, further broken up into school districts of wildly varying sizes, so it might be done differently in different parts of the country.
