At the end of 2013, the Reimburse Educators Who Pay for Academic Year Supplies Act was to have run its course. Under this Act, school teachers who purchased supplies for the classes were able to claim a $250 tax credit annually to help offset the cost of materials. In a wonderful example of constituent power, an elementary school teacher in Derry, NH wrote her Congresswoman, Carol Shea-Porter, explaining why the the REPAY Act should be extended. Shea-Porter, a social worker-turned-Congresswoman, sponsored the legislation to extend the Act beyond the 2013 expiration.
“What it does for teachers is it allows them to take a $250 above-the-line deduction. So regardless of whether they actually do an itemized return or not they still will be able to claim this deduction. And it’s to thank them and help them because we all know that teachers reach into their own pockets and buy supplies for their classroom and their children,” Shea-Porter said.
As the daughter of a former public school music teacher, I recall stories of my mother hauling xylophones in the back of her unreliable car. She taught at four different schools, and none of them would spare her a storage area. When the instruments were stolen from her car, she had to help cover the cost of replacing them. My high school best friend, now a teacher, recently sent out a fundraising page on social media, as she wanted to purchase tablet computers for her kindergarten classroom. The curriculum she devised around the tablets addressed the language needs of her students, a majority of whom do not speak English as their first language. Her friends and family funded her project.
I saw a bumper sticker at a feminist bookstore once that read, “Wouldn’t it be nice if we over-invested in schools, and held bake sales to build missiles?” Clearly, when teaching professionals are carrying 30 xylophones everywhere they go, and asking their aunts and uncles to fund classroom initiatives, we have a disconnect.
As I read this article, I started thinking about all the ways in which social workers could benefit from being added to this legislation. How many of our clients have discreetly received bags of toiletries at the end of a session with us? Is there a social worker anywhere who doesn’t stop in the dollar bins at Target, looking for needed items? And forget about hotel shampoo and soap. Those are all coming home with me, and then to my office. And Shea-Porter, the Congresswoman who sponsored this important Act renewal, is a former social worker. My first thought was that she should have added her own profession to the REPAY Act. And then I remembered the bumper sticker about bake sales and missiles.
Is a tax credit a step in the right direction to address the monetary resources certain professionals pour back into their work? Or does it just sustain a broken system? Perhaps the REPAY Act makes things a bit more “fair” to the professionals–but what about for our clients? What if we took the $250 allocation for every school teacher, and invested it into the schools in the first place? What if instead of extending the tax credit to social workers, we funded social services and social safety nets more robustly?
