for the teachers

A shout out to all the public school teachers out there.

Every year for the past fifteen years or so, i have done our tax returns myself. I am a self-employed attorney. in other words, other than keeping my clients from themselves, what i do for living is completely useless. My wife is a public school teacher. I bet if you made yourself a list of the five most influential people in your lives, at least one, probably more than one, would be one of the teachers you had while you went through school.

Being self-employed, I get to write off just about every conceivable expense on my tax return. Every paper clip. Every piece of paper. Every folder. Since my office is in the house, I even get to write off what I would have thought were common household expenses. A portion of the utilities, a portion of the mortgage and even when the guy comes to cut the grass. It is my understanding that if I really wanted to, I could buy myself a small coffee machine, deduct that from my taxes, and then deduct all the coffee, filters and cups I wanted, as long as I drank the coffee during business hours in my office. I can get away with it. Come to think of it, I do not have to get away with it. It's legal. Besides, I have the coffee stains on the floor proving I at least spilled the coffee in the office. Come to think of it, I guess that means I can hire somebody to clean the carpet in the office and deduct that as an expense also.

My wife is a public school teacher. Each year, she spends thousands -- THOUSANDS -- of dollars on supplies for her classroom. Educating our children, Betsy DeVos' thoughts notwithstanding, is not a business. IT IS A PUBLIC OBLIGATION.

We as a society have a sacred duty to educate our children so that they may go on in life as contributing members of our society. There is nothing more important we do as a society -- nothing -- than properly educating our children. As a corollary to this, you would think that ensuring that our public school classrooms are properly supplied with all the pens, paper, notebooks, folders and equipment needed to ensure the children get a proper education is of paramount importance. This does not even get close to talking about ensuring all the best textbooks are available.

Well...

We do not fund our schools adequately, or at least properly. One of the first places the politicians look to cut every year is funding for public schools. If you want a microcosm of what is wrong with the way our schools prioritize what funding they get, all you need to know is the fact that in the district my wife teaches in, the classrooms are not air conditioned, but the offices of the administration and their staff are. Now, over the years I have come to know many of these people. They are very fine folks, who in the vast majority of the cases have appeared to have the interests of the kids at heart.

But think about what is more important on a day to day basis in early September and mid June. Should we be more concerned with the comfort of a bean counter who has no day to day contact with the children, or the fact that the classrooms are so hot it is impossible for the children to learn, regardless of how good the teacher may be. I know of some teachers who have brought portable air conditioners into their classrooms just so they, or more importantly, the children could have a fighting chance.

If I did that for my office, I could deduct the cost of the unit. I could then deduct the cost of installing the unit if I needed to hire somebody to do it. I could then deduct the cost of the electricity needed to run the unit. If the unit broke down a few months later, I could deduct the cost of having somebody come to repair it, and if that was not possible, I could buy a new unit and start the deduction process all over again.

If my wife bought an air conditioner for her classroom, she could do none of this. Well, she could buy the unit herself, bring it to her classroom, hope there was somebody at the school who would help her lug it from the parking lot to the classroom, and then hope it worked once it got there -- all of this provided for simply by the hope that the school administration, while sitting in their comfortable offices, would allow her to do this in the first place.

Every year, teachers all over America buy supplies for their classrooms, never mind air conditioners, because the politicians, aided by some sort of perverse anti-education, anti-teacher culture, slash budgets to the point where the districts have to make choices.

And those choices inevitably come down to adequately staffing and supplying the classrooms or installing new air conditioners in the administrative offices.

And each year, the districts make the wrong choice.

So the teachers go to Staples, to Office Max, to Costco. To the Dollar Store. They search for economical supplies and equipment for their classrooms. The stores, knowing this, give the teachers discounts, which is nice of them, but begs the question of why the teachers have to go out and spend their own money to ensure their public school classrooms are adequately supplied in the first place.

As I said, my wife typically spends a couple of thousand dollars a year to supply her own classroom. She does not submit an invoice, bill or voucher to be reimbursed, nor would she be reimbursed or expect to be so if she did.

And when I do our tax returns, while I get to deduct the cost of bottled water I could sip while leaning back in the chair I bought in front of the newly installed air conditioner, while staring at the screen of my new computer and regaling in the newly installed sound system -- all of which are deductible -- my wife, as a teacher, is limited to a $250 educator's deduction for supplies purchased for use in her classroom. Typically, that deduction ends up reimbursing us a grand total of something in the neighborhood of eighty-five dollars.

So apparently, our politicians and our local newspaper who has led the charge in bashing just about everything about public school teachers you can possibly think of, have believed until now that it is a good and fair trade off to have our public school teachers spend about two thousand dollars out of their pockets annually in the hope that they will be reimbursed eighty-five dollars when they do their taxes.

Until now.

Now they want to take away the educator's deduction entirely.

Now they want our public school teachers to go out and spend thousands of dollars every year of their own money to supply their classrooms adequately, and get NOTHING back for it.

Think of that for a moment. Is there another profession out there where the employee is forced to go out and spend thousands of dollars of their own money each year just to have the supplies at hand to do the job, and then either not get reimbursed for the purchases or have the ability to deduct the cost on their tax returns? Would you take that job? On top of that, would you take a job in which you were forced to spend thousands of dollars out of your own pocket every year just to have the supplies on hand to do the job, knowing you were not going to be either reimbursed or be able to deduct the cost on your taxes, all the while putting up with the daily abuse from the public, led by those very same politicians and newspapers that would deny you proper funding?

That's what I thought.

What I do for a living is nice. Mom gets to tell her friends i am her son, the lawyer. Well, somebody has to do it. I get to deduct everything.

My wife, who has a career that is more important than anything I or any of my clients will ever do will now get to deduct nothing.

All this in the face of laws that require classrooms to be adequately funded. Laws that for some unknown reason have to be fought for regularly in court and in the court of public opinion.

All this in the face of union contracts that require the classrooms to be adequately supplied, and do not require the teachers to spend their own money to do so.

So here is a suggestion for our public school teachers.

STOP BUYING THE SUPPLIES.

You are not required by any law or contract to buy the supplies yourself. Force the school district to buy everything -- just like they are supposed to in the first place.

If the parents complain, give them a list of supplies that you believe will be needed so that their children will be able to learn, and let them pay for it. It sounds cruel, but I would be willing to bet that if all the teachers stopped buying supplies, parents would start going to school board meetings, like they don't but should, in order to complain. The school boards would then start going to the politicians to agitate for proper funding. Maybe they would prioritize pencils in the classrooms over lattes in the administrative offices.

And ultimately maybe....

Expenses fronted by teachers for their classrooms would be just as reimbursable and deductible as the purchase of a cell phone made by an attorney for his practice so he can yammer away with his clients while in his car, also deductible, while driving to and from court, parking, tolls and mileage also deductible.

And then I woke up.