Donate to a School?!

Oh, I think if you've ever talked to me about education you've heard my tirade against the public school system. You know already that I am not happy with the school system we have here, and therefore do not like paying taxes to them and will not send my child to their school. But, if you haven't, I'll summarize it very quickly by saying that it's a parenting conflict thing wherein I am the parent and I expect to be informed. Unlike a few of the people I know who found out very important things about their children hours or days after the incident occurred.

I'm also very against hours of homework for a 5-year old, but that's another subject that I will concede may not be fixable due to government regulation.

Anyway... for a lot of reasons, I don't generally like donating to "schools". One being that even though we pay a ton of taxes to the schools, it seems that teachers never have enough to get the tools they need! You pay and pay and yet none of it filters down to the teachers.

Tonight, however, on the show 20/20, they introduced a website that I think is the coolest thing since peanut butter-- and it's a great way to get involved in education without feeling as though (like me) you are donating to a government wasteland. It is a site called Donors Choose.

The premise is that teachers are able to submit their project needs (or for some of the very low income schools, just plain needs!) and have people donate to their project. The money goes directly to the classroom for the project and is not filtered through bureaucracy. Some of the projects are really cool (one that they featured was a teacher wanting to buy history books based on the movie "Night at the Museum" so she could teach her kids history in a more fun way) or just basic (right now on the website is a teacher who needs to buy boxes to put books in because they are having trouble locating the ones they need). Other teachers are simply asking for pencils and notebooks... there were a lot of requests for musical instrument project donations.

The bottom line to this post is simply that, if you want to feel good about donating money to something, this looks like a great place to go. I wasn't sure how many of you are able to watch 20/20, I usually don't I just happened upon it tonight... and I wanted to pass it on.

www.donorschoose.org