Man steps in to help after grandson's elementary school runs out of paper for the year
A school in Arizona is facing an unusual issue as it approaches the end of the school year, and the limit of its budget.
Walter Buse said that it seemed too good to be true when his grandson, who is a student at Falcon Hill Elementary school in Mesa, Ariz., came home three days in a row without any homework. But when he went to the school to find out if the student was pulling a fast one on him, Buse told Pheonix, Arizona station KNXV that the school was aware students didn’t have assignments to work on at home.
“Sorry we don’t have any paper,” he recalled an administrator telling him. “We’ve used up our quota for the year, and we can’t buy anymore.”
And although Buse told the outlet that “a school without paper is like a school with no kids,” the school’s financial advisor, Scott Thompson, also told KNXV that things like running out of supplies can happen as the end of the school year nears.
“It’s a tight year for us, for sure,” Thompson explained. “So you get toward the end of the year and when things are tight, you might run out.”
Thompson said that it’s a result of both how the principal chooses to allocate the yearly budget and the lack of investment in education from the state.
“That has been cut for many years, since the recession,” he said of the state’s funding of the district, “and we really desperately need that money back.”
While Buse couldn’t provide the school with the additional funding that administrators are looking for, he was able to help with its paper supply. Just last week, he dropped off a shipment of paper in an act of kindness that didn’t go unnoticed.
“You'd think I carried in a basket of gold the way they acted at the office,” Buse said. “So I knew it was appreciated.”
Neither Buse nor Mesa Public Schools immediately responded to Yahoo Lifestyle’s requests for comment.
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