Iowa's teachers deserve our support

                             This is an example of a bulletin board that took two days to build.

While most children in Iowa will be starting school next week there's a very good chance that their teachers started preparing for the youngsters almost a month earlier.


This is particularly true in the primary grades, where our state's youngest students are learning to read, write, do math and science projects for the first time.


In Ankeny, Iowa, second-grade teachers got a jump on the season, where classes are to start Aug. 23. In one elementary school in this fast-growing district, the four teachers all changed classrooms, which meant they had to build new billboards in each room. This would be a dozen billboards or more. Tasks like this preparation take more than 65 hours of time ahead of the school year, and cost each teacher more than $300 out-of-pocket in costs.


Each of the four teachers brought family members to help them in preparations. In one classroom, a mother cut out colored paper for ribbons for a billboard, while the pregnant teacher's husband and father helped to do chores that required a ladder, like pasting the alphabet on one wall, and the numbers from -20 to 100 on another wall.

Teachers like these folks need all kinds of support in every school district in Iowa.

According to a story published in the Aug. 15, 2018 Quad-City Times, the Davenport Education Association hosted a "Re-Store" event for new teachers in the district. The teachers were invited to shop (at a former elementary school) for supplies for their classrooms, and they did. Imagine the out-of-pocket costs they saved!

In addition, this story showed that Davenport's teachers spend an average of $400 of their own money on classroom supplies.

This is most probably approximately what all teachers in Iowa spend.

Iowa's teachers need support, not the pressure of changing society on a moment's notice. In many cases, government, and the general public, heap loads of responsibility on the state's teachers.

They simply need more cheerleaders for the work they do.

(Full disclosure: Blog author Deirdre Cox Baker was the mother who helped her daughter prepare her classroom for the new school year.