According to the trade journal "The public school" then every other teacher pays for materials themselves to one extent or another. There are examples of colored pencils, spices for food science, teaching aids, red cabbage for physics/chemistry, cress seeds, grippers for pencils if students need help learning how to hold a pencil correctly, or just extra pencils and erasers for students. Teachers experience having to ask permission and it is easier not to. It is also not the same for everyone. It is also difficult to get DKK 9.99 refunded, and they feel limited by the schools’ purchase agreements, where you have to order well in advance. A single person tells about a foreign subscription where EAN cannot be paid for, so the teacher pays for it himself. Trips out of the house cannot be afforded either, because transport cannot be afforded. In the survey, the average was DKK 545 per year, which the teachers used. The teachers also request guidelines.
I’m probably not the only teacher here, so now I’m curious if it’s a picture that you can recognize. It sounds crazy that in today’s Denmark the physics/chemistry teacher cannot afford red cabbage, so the students can make a red cabbage indicator, and the food science teacher has to buy the spices themselves. I know we have to save in elementary school, but are we really that far out anywhere? My own child also sometimes says that he cannot afford various things. They had to bring wrapping paper at one point to wrap a present in, and last year they had to bring paper for Christmas cutting day because they wanted to use recycled paper. According to my child, it was because they couldn’t afford it, but I don’t know.
Fortunately, I can’t quite recognize it myself, but I wonder if I/we are privileged at our primary school? We must, of course, use the municipality’s purchasing agreements when possible, and there you can get quite a lot delivered to your door. In addition, we have various purchase cards that we borrow, for all local shops and larger chains such as Ikea, Silvan, Panduro, Selfmade, etc. This is to avoid us posting, because it costs a fee when the school reimburses us , so they would prefer to avoid that. They also ask us to combine orders to avoid shipping fees, but usually you can just buy extra of something else.
We have a multitude of budgets, such as subject budgets, subject room budgets, year budgets and departmental budgets, and it can be a little confusing where things fall under. The subject budgets are quickly used up, so we could use a little more there. The subject rooms are common to all departments and slightly vary in amount, but it is possible to apply extra each year. Some supervisors feel more limited by their budget than others, but there is also a correlation between whether you were applied for or not, so you have a bit of control over it yourself. If, as a teacher, you need material for something specific in a subject room, you have to buy from your own department’s account, where there are probably different guidelines, I can imagine, depending on the manager.
We do not ask for permission for low amounts and the limit is probably what they call it "common sense" in our department. The agreement is that we do not buy pleasant things and sweets from the department’s budget, we use the year’s small budget for that. So we buy, for example, rolls for the last day of school on that budget. And if there is something that we can’t quite figure out where it belongs, then it comes down to the department. We have asked for clearer guidelines and amounts on the department’s budget, but have not received it, and so we actually buy what we need, again of course with common sense.
Regarding trips, then we are a public school, so there are many free offers in our municipality, and we have travel cards, so we take the bus into the city. We also have an 8-seater bus that we can borrow if needed. However, it must be booked well in advance, but is good if we have students who cannot handle both the trip and transport, so that they can be driven and still participate to some extent. I have no experience of whether we were allowed to go on trips, which were expensive. I think the annual budget could be used there. It’s a bit about finding the right budget. We also have a camp school budget, where last year we were not aware of the amount, and we had actually spent too little.
I have not paid for materials or the like myself. The only thing I have paid for myself is petrol when I drive to get things in the city, but there I like to time it with my own purchases. In principle, you can also enter driving in our app and get something reimbursed, but I have not looked into that. And then I have driven with students back and forth once on a trip because there was snow, and they couldn’t ride a bike. So I recognize that you cannot do some things so that you pay yourself, but fortunately our school has organized purchases in such a way that it is possible to buy almost everything in one way or another, so that we are not in the situations where you don’t have time to get a handle on the receipts, and then you don’t get it done. I also sometimes buy online via EAN, but if I wanted a subscription, like one of the teachers in the articles, which could not be purchased via EAN, I don’t know how that would be possible either. There are still some limitations though.
I don’t feel limited as a teacher, what about the rest of you? I can imagine that if you feel like the teachers in the articles, it must be really hard to feel that you cannot afford to do your teaching as well as you would like. It must affect one’s job satisfaction.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Denmark/comments/1ch2vwc/i_følge_fagbladet_folkeskolen_betaler_hver_anden/
Posted by Tindersp