An open letter from public school teacher Leah Feldman:

We already don’t have enough report cards. For our Spanish-speaking families -- the majority of our school -- we have to photocopy a photocopy to send home.

We don’t exactly have enough workbooks, either. One third are black and white photocopies of the one we are supposed to have. Most of the pencils in my school have a “Star Wars” logo on them because two teachers were able to get a bunch for a deal. With their own money. This is not unusual. All the teachers I have ever worked with spend hundreds, if not thousands, of their own dollars. In the past four years, I have spent about $3,000, and if I want my classroom to function, I will keep spending more.

This is where California public schools are today, in March of 2008, before the slated $ 4.8 million cut by Governor Schwarzenegger. Since I began teaching low-income students in California back in 2004, I have seen prostitutes outside of my school, drug deals in progress, needles and condoms on the street and, in my current site in the flatlands of East Oakland, ten-foot spiked fences leading to a concrete-only playground for my students. It is as though California is preparing my five-year-old students for jail now. A few more dollars towards education will not only change my students’ lives, but will positively affect the budget of the state for years to come.

I became a teacher, and specifically a low-income public school teacher, because I believe education is the great equalizer. With a proper education, children can rise above poverty and crime to become the productive citizens that will guide our future. I do not believe that the color of my students’ skin should dictate their future, yet schools like mine are de facto segregated. I have never had a white student.

Schools like mine are being delivered a slap across the face: We are asked to do without to the tune of reducing student spending by $800 per-student ($24,000 per-classroom): that’s laying off 107,000 teachers or 137,000 Education Support Professionals or increasing class size by 35 percent.

I want someone besides me to tell the little girl in my class who can’t afford to bring a snack to school to do without. I want someone else to tell my students who are in and out of homeless shelters to do without. I want someone else to tell the little boy who gets beaten up at home, who thinks of my little classroom -- without heat or air conditioning and with one barred window -- as his only safe place, that he has to do without.

Twenty years ago, California voters passed Proposition 98, which was to create more, not less, for our children. I want to know why at every school I’ve worked at I’ve had to buy my students their back-to-school supplies. I want to know where that money goes, because we don’t see it. And I want to know how anyone can possibly think we can possible make do -- and improve our test scores! -- with less. Yet, as a suspension of Proposition 98 looms, we are told that we will not only have to make do with less, but if our students falter, we will be penalized.

Next August, when the school bell rings in my hot, stuffy classroom, I will be there for the poorest children of California. Governor Schwarzenegger, will you?

Sincerely,

Leah Feldman

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