When college football fans line up to attend the Peach Bowl or tune in to watch the game — and the ads — Thursday, some tiny fraction of the revenue they generate will pay for organizational bins in Triaka Larry’s high school science classroom.
Peach Bowl Inc., the non-profit sponsor of the Atlanta contest between Houston and Florida State, teamed up with the College Football Playoff Foundation in a pledge to fulfill every request made by APS teachers in the fifth through 12th grade as of Tuesday morning. The money will pay for books, snacks, iPads and other teaching tools requested by 136 teachers of 17,974 students at 54 schools, according to DonorsChoose, which helped coordinate the contribution.
In the surprise announcement Tuesday, the two non-profit organizations said they are committing $200,000 of the proceeds to help Larry and more than 100 other Atlanta teachers buy books, tablet computers and other educational tools.
Larry said the most challenging part of her job is ensuring that her 160 students get their graded work back quickly, so it's still relevant to what she's teaching. She put a request on a the crowd-funding website DonorsChoose.org for a set of bins that will hold tests and other work in a way that her teens can find them on their own, saving classroom time.
“I get so overwhelmed,” the veteran teacher at North Atlanta High School said. “So I need everything organized, and this is like, perfect. This is the best Christmas gift.”
Gary Stokan, president and CEO of Peach Bowl Inc., said the donation furthers the group’s mission to become “the most charitable bowl game in the country.” The group says it has already “invested” $6 million in APS, including $1.4 million since 2007 to pay the salaries of high school counselors who help athletes stay on track for college. There’s also a college scholarship program.
Public money, even for simple things like organizational bins and paper, is in short supply these days.
Teachers have been paying out of pocket for pencils, papers and other small items for as long as there have been schools, but complaints about school budgets have grown louder since 2003, when Georgia began shortchanging them with “austerity” cuts. The state began restoring some of the money after the Great Recession, but a gap approaching half a billion dollars remains between what the state is supposed to pay under its own education budgeting formula and what it actually contributes.
The hit for Atlanta this year is $11 million. The donation Tuesday amounts to less than 2 percent of that and covers a third of the 51,500 students at APS, but Larry, the teacher, said everything helps.
She buys paper at discount stores when the central office can’t produce enough, and plans to get more with some of the $500 she expects from the donation. She’s also going to order a half-dozen models of the human circulatory, nervous and skeletal systems so her anatomy students can see what they are studying.
The 10-year teaching veteran has undergraduate and graduate degrees in biology and said conveying her knowledge about science is the easy part of her job. Shuffling the stacks of tests and other paperwork that are accumulating ever faster as class sizes grow is the hardest part, she said, and the donation to buy the bins, a simple thing, could easily save her 20 minutes in each of her half dozen 90-minute classes.
“It’s not a ton of money at all,” she said, “but it’s definitely going to change my classroom for the better.”
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