Administrators Are Realizing How Grim It Is to Have Teachers Pay for Their Own Appreciation Gifts
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses the absurdity of jeans pass policies that charge teachers to wear their own clothes, then use the proceeds to buy teacher appreciation gifts.
Key Takeaways
- The jeans pass cycle is absurd - Teachers pay for jeans passes, and that money funds teacher appreciation gifts — they're essentially buying their own gifts
- Jeans restrictions are unprofessional - Charging teachers to wear comfortable clothes treats them as less than professionals
- Approach change with compassion - Many administrators inherited these systems and are only now recognizing how problematic they are
- Funding limitations create real challenges - Principals face restrictions on public funds and often rely on alternative funding sources for staff appreciation
Transcript
I saw a great question from an assistant principal today who'd been tasked with rethinking the whole system where teachers have to pay for a jeans pass and then that money goes into a fund that essentially pays for their teacher appreciation gifts.
And seeing that realization, like that light bulb click on, was really encouraging to me because I think these are things that we're rethinking as a profession.
And we have to remember that there are real people who are kind of caught in the middle of these systems that they've inherited, they didn't invent.
And they're just kind of normal to the people who are in them.
And yet, when you say it out loud, when you say like, you have to pay money to wear your own clothes, and then that money is used to buy your teacher appreciation presents.
Like, that sounds super, super grim when you lay it all out there like that.
And I think we have to do that.
We have to do that with compassion.
Because again, most of us did not invent these systems.
People are just kind of waking up to like, oh, this is not a good situation.
And I don't think the Hopefully, nobody thinks I was especially mean to them, but I just wanted to say that we're all human and we're all learning new things all the time, and change takes place in different places at different paces, and yet the internet makes it possible for opinion to spread very, very quickly.
I stand by everything I've said about jeans passes in the past that I think it's a very unprofessional idea that teachers should have to pay for a pass or receive a pass or have some sort of restrictions on when they can wear jeans and when they can't.
This whole thing is just kind of silly to me.
But I think it's doubly insulting when people have to pay to wear their own clothes and then that money...
is used to buy their teacher appreciation presence.
But again, I'm very encouraged to see that people are rethinking this and looking for ways to make it better.
One thing that often does not come up very publicly is just how restricted money is for principals.
There are a lot of rules on what you cannot use public funds for.
I talked in an earlier video about uh, sending people out to lunch to meet a new colleague and giving them money to go out to lunch.
And of course you can't use taxpayer dollars to do that.
And most principals have some sort of slush fund, right?
Like somebody donated some money and it goes in a special, hopefully not like an actual jar, but you know, it doesn't go on the same books as the, you know, money from the state to fund teacher salaries.
Like you have little, like maybe PTA or like other sources of funds, maybe a business donates something.
And I think for principals in some locations, that can be very challenging to come up with if there's just not a lot of money in your community, if there are a lot of schools asking the same businesses for money.
But be compassionate towards your principal and just recognize that they're in the middle of a lot of this stuff.
And let me know what you think.