Helping teachers teach with donorschoose.org

Teaching is a job that requires the right supplies that are sometimes not accessible in the classroom because of a lack of funding. Every year, teachers are spending their own hard-earned money on class room materials, essential for their student’s education. Whether its pencils or paper altogether, teacher spend over a billion in classrooms supplies every year. That is why Charles Best founded a crowd founding platform called DonorsChooose.org, that has raised hundreds of millions of dollars to fund projects for public school students and teachers across the country. And now for the next few weeks, you can decide how to spend $1 million to help classrooms across the nation. Watch The Hype Magazine’s short satellite presentation to learn about Limeadesforlearninng.com and what you can do at a Sonic drive through to help the cause.

Charles, you started the website DonorsChoose.org while teaching in the Bronx.

That’s exactly right! I was a teacher and my colleagues and I were spending our own money on classroom supplies like copy paper and pencils and we would often talk about books that we wanted our students to read, a field trip we wanted to take them on or a pair of microscopes we needed for a science experiment. I just figured there were people out there who’d want to help teachers like us if they could see exactly where their money was going. So, we created a website where teachers create classroom project requests and donors can choose the projects that they want to support, but the great news is that now you don’t need to open your own wallet to bring a classroom dream to life.

Christi, you have a longstanding relationship with DonorsChoose.org. Can you tell us about the Limeades for Learning initiative and the plan for this fall campaign?

Donors Choose has been a wonderful partner for sonic for almost 10 years in fact this is our ninth fall voting campaign and this fall, we’re putting a million dollars into the hands of sonic fans and guests. They are the ones who are going to tell us where to spend the money. All folks have to do is go to Limeadesforlearninng.com and cast a vote for a teacher’s project.

What types of items are teachers requesting for their classrooms?

The project requests range from a classroom library to a field trip, to a planetarium to learn about the solar system, to butterfly cocoons for a science activity, to therapeutic horseback riding for disabled students. They range far and wide, but what they all show are the needs in our classrooms and the passion and creativity of our most hard-working teachers.

How can our viewers get involved to help locally?

It’s simple all your viewers need to do is go to Limeadesforlearninng.com today through October 22. They can search for a project in their hometown or they would love to calculus, they could to search for calculus projects and pick a project to vote on. You can vote every day with a valid email address and for folks who go to Sonic drive-in and make a purchase, we’ll give you some extra votes when you visit us there.

Charles, why are the right tools in the classroom so important to learning?

Well teachers want to go beyond chalkboards and textbooks to bring learning to life for their students. That means they need hands-on materials for project-based learning and those are often the requests that you’ll find if you go to Limeadesforlearninng.com and vote on the classroom project in your own community that you want to see sonic drive and bring to life.

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About the Author

David Morales is the Executive Editor of The Hype magazine. A graduate of Eastern Michigan University, David has a background as an artist manager, writer, blogger, drummer, and in the human services industry. He is passionate about helping others, learning and has a deep empathy for the creative process. You can follow his social media @dcypherstudios