Crawl, Walk, Run

I've always been a "Go big or go home" kind of person. So when Jack Sebring and I looped in Jason Edmeads to try to raise some money for Wake County teachers and kids I thought, "$10,000! We can do that!"

There is power in a crawl, walk, run mentality. Turns out competing for precious discretionary money is hard to do. Everyone has a million places their money needs to go, so the goal of coming up with $10,000 in less than a year may have been running when we should have been crawling.

So I made the executive decision to reset our goal for now until May 2024. Let's raise $1,000 for teachers right here in Wake County. The charity we are donating the funds to directly - Wake Education Partnership - has long-standing programs that allow teachers to "shop" for supplies that they would ordinarily pay OUT OF POCKET to purchase for our kids. Let's give some back and help them out. Who is in?

100 people giving $10...just $10...will reach this modest but impactful goal. Check out more on our site for this fundraiser:

https://wake-kids.jeremymdavis.com/

Spoiler alert: Wake county teachers are spending on average $62 of their own money per student per year for supplies that the education budget doesn't support. Your $10 plus that of a few friends can meet that need for a kid and their servant teacher.

PS. Another friend of mine raised a great point by saying, "You know, we pay taxes and legislators should be pushing those tax dollars into our schools." I agree 100%. However, they aren't. NC schools while solid in curriculum and programming, fall far behind in how we compensate teachers and fund schools. The NEA ranks North Carolina 46th in the nation in average teacher starting salary. We're slightly better at #36 in average teacher salary. IS IT ACCEPTABLE for all but 4 states to be paying starting teachers more than NC does? IS IT ACCEPTABLE that on average, teachers in 35 other states make more than our teachers? I would say, No. HELL NO. We rank #42 in per student spending. This is pathetic, especially for an area that prides itself on its university education excellence.

The thing is, we can't directly change those numbers quickly. I encourage you to write your county and state legislators and urge them to pay our teachers more and fund our schools better. But politics are politics...slow and ulterior-motive driven.

Donate to this or another fundraiser to immediately positively impact a teacher's situation and directly improve the quality of education our kids are receiving.

Let's do this!