There’s a decent chance that the assortment of items in any North Carolina public school classroom (pencils, rulers, even those ever-popular “hang in there!” inspirational cat posters) were paid for out of the pocket of a teacher making a starting salary of $41,000.
Tools4Schools, organized by nonprofit WakeEd Partnership, is one of the local programs hoping to cover some of those costs.
“In our first two years, we gave away $1.6 million in new school supplies,” Keith Poston, president of WakeEd, told INDY at a media event organized by Raleigh congresswoman Deborah Ross at WakeEd’s Capital Boulevard location, which looks sort of like the school supply section of a small department store. “There’s 10,000 teachers in Wake County, last school year we served more than 5,000 of them.”…