Teresa Danks, an Oklahoma teacher who was tired of having to dig into her own income to pay for classroom supplies, has taken an interesting approach to getting her point across. took to panhandling to get her point across.
Danks, a 50-year-old teacher of Claremore, Oklahoma, has spent her summer vacation shopping at garage sales and thrift stores in order to purchase the supplies for her her third-grade classroom
However, after a conversation with her husband last week about the amount of money she was spending, they came up with a better idea: panhandling.
The Tulsa Public Schools teacher bought a poster board and wrote “Teacher Needs School Supplies! Anything Helps.”
via ABC News:
Danks — who said she makes an annual salary of around $35,000 and spends nearly $2,000 of her own money each year on her classroom — collected around $50 in cash. She posted a photo of herself on Facebook that went viral and drew the attention of a local news station.
When she went back out with her sign later that day with news cameras in tow, Danks, who described her elementary school students as mostly low-income, collected another $50.
“What started just for me to get supplies in my classroom and help my students has really grown much greater than myself,” said Danks, who has since started a GoFundMe page and a Facebook page titled “Begging for Education.”
Tulsa Public Schools superintendent Deborah Gist told ABC that the district’s budget cuts have forced some teachers to search for jobs elsewhere.
https://www.facebook.com/teresa.gorhamdanks/posts/10213634356153472
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