Have you run an elementary class? Oh, I forgot, you have what, 10 years experience? 20?

Almost every school does this now. It's enormously time consuming for the teacher to keep track of what pencil belongs to what kid. They give a list of required supplies, the parent's buy them, they pool them, and as your kid needs something, it's given to them. Plain and simple. Nothing to do with communist plots or plans to overthrow capitalism. It has to do with large class sizes, and no funding for basic school supplies.

So, you've got the solution? "Individual bins." "Kids keep it themselves in their desks." It's all been tried, and it's all a huge waste of time. It's just typical crap. People have their shorts in their cracks over ten bucks in school supplies. Somehow this is an indication of the failure of public education?

Slow news day?

Okay, so it's not fair that your kid might use 10 pencils and someone else's kid used 11. Let's have a bloody riot over a couple bucks in school supplies. Most of our schools have aging playground equipment, class sizes balloning to over 30, no gym equipment, no aides for disabled kids, no early intervention programs, etc, but we're going to go on the war-path because the pencil distribution system might not be fair.

I can tell you that the parents that usually cry like crap over the injustice of the supplies-system are the ones that do the LEAST everywhere else. I can spot their kids a mile away. They are selfish boors that have adopted their parent's rude, overbearing, nit-picking, moronic micro-management stance on the world.

Of all the things to try to fix, this is what people are worried about?

Get a life.