Amanda Plourde scans the aisle for one special item when she visits the grocery store.
Box Tops.
“We have gummies upon gummies because they have Box Tops,” said the Lisbon mother of two. “We have Progresso soup that we don’t eat because it has Box Tops. We started buying a new brand of eggs because they have Box Tops.”
“Yeah, it’s an addiction in my house. A bad one, but it’s good,” Plourde said.
Box Tops are the small coupons attached to hundreds of grocery items. Schools across the country collect them and earn 10 cents per coupon from Box Tops for Education.
Plourde is not alone with her enthusiasm. She belongs to the Lisbon Community School Parent Teacher Organization, a group of parents that holds meetings on Friday nights and heads to the dump Saturday morning.
“It’s called we have no life,” said Pamela Shane, PTO vice president and mother of a fourth-grade daughter.
“The things we do for our kids,” said Chrissie Maney, a Lisbon mom who is happy to dig through your trash if it means earning 10 cents for her kid’s school. “This is money,” said Maney as she picked a Progresso soup can from a Dumpster. “Ten cents for each one. This is great!”
Once per month, volunteers with the Lisbon PTO visit the transfer and recycling center in Lisbon Falls in search of Box Tops, pull tabs, Coca Cola reward points, Campbell Soup labels and returnable bottles. “Dumpster diving divas,” said Maney as she kindly offered to empty bins of cardboard, tin cans and plastic for people on a recent Saturday morning. “We kind of had to come up with a cool name for it so we have been calling ourselves the diving divas,” Maney said.
“Diving for Box Tops” has payed off. The PTO collected 573 Box Tops, 670 pull tabs, $20 worth of returnables and 356 Coke reward points during their March and April visits to the dump. “We are doing pretty good even though people think we’re crazy doing this,” Shane said. “We will take every penny we can get,” she said.
Collecting Box Tops has earned the Lisbon Community School $4,192.83 during the current school year, enough to put the school at the top of the list for schools collecting Box Tops within a 25-mile radius of Lisbon and fourth overall in the state.
The money funds extras that are not covered in the school budget, Maney said. “We do all kinds of things through the PTO.” Family events every month, field trips, the “fifth grade farewell,” shirts for the drama club and staff appreciation week are all funded by PTO fundraisers, Maney said.
“They are just the most committed hard working people,” LCS principal Carlene Iverson said about the school PTO. “They are a group of very involved parents, who find a great balance between selling products and fundraisers that do not require parents to spend money.”
“I am so thankful to have them,” said Iverson, who along with Assistant Principal Ryan Patrie joined the divas at the dump one Saturday.
“The philosophy here is whatever it takes,” Iverson said.
(c)2012 the Sun Journal (Lewiston, Maine)
Distributed by MCT Information Services
Maine parents head to the dump for Box Tops
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Two months of dumpster diving netted 573 Box Tops= $57.30 I think their efforts could be better spent having a fundraiser of some sort.
You would rather have them bug people for money that they may not have to spare then to collect box tops and cans?? I don’t have any children in school and I save box tops and school points!!
Buying a $1.50 can of soup that they wont eat….. for a 10 cent box top? They could have donated the whole $1.50 to the school…..?!?!?
I have to believe that they were talking about empty soup cans from the dumpster (and my can of Progresso shows a $2.59 price tag). :-)
lol… nope it says they wont eat it…
“We have gummies upon gummies because they have Box Tops,” said the Lisbon mother of two. “We have Progresso soup that we don’t eat because it has Box Tops. We started buying a new brand of eggs because they have Box Tops.”
crazy if u ask me
and donated the soup to a food pantry.
Teacher’s a making upwards of $40K, for jobs that are essentially part-time high (summers, weekends off). And parents are digging through trash to buy classroom supplies….why? I’d feel very differently about this if I saw some teachers digging through the dumpster.
As a wife of a teacher, who has been working in the same district for ten years, please tell me where they are making upwards of 40k a year, I would love to have my husband stop working two jobs to help us pay bills. Oh, and before you ask, I work 40+ hours a week myself and we are raising one child. We also watch our budget very carefully and do not overspend. I am tired of these posts stating that teachers are rich and that they need to put more money into the classrooms. Every year we set aside money to cover classroom supplies for him, because we know we are going to have to put something into it. And I am not talking 10-20 dollars here and there; I am talking 100-200 dollars. So for all of you out there that have no idea what teacher actually do or earn, please do some research before you spout off. It isn’t as easy as standing in front of a class and just talking. My husband is up almost until midnight grading papers, doing portfolio work, setting the next weeks lesson plans, etc. And that’s after he gets home for working his second job. Then he wakes up at 5:00am and starts the day again. And that is the life for many of the teachers I know. And to put on top that the parents who don’t care, the kids with the same attitude (you know kids learn from their parents!) it becomes a stressful day. This year already he has a child attack him, parents scream at him about not being notified their child was missing too much school (3 days a week, every week, for the first four months of school) and was changed grades to help bring up math and science score, then told a week before school started that he would be teaching everything, and he had to learn three new subjects in a week. So here are my suggestions: Parents raise your kids, don’t rely on everyone else. Society support education, stop bashing it every chance you get because you think you everything about it. It’s easy when you are on the outside looking in to solve all the problems, but until you are in that work or situation, do you really know what is going on? My answer to that is No.
The prior poster obviously never taught at school. Otherwise, he would have known that a teacher’s day doesn’t stop when the final bell goes off.
when i was in 8th grade 11yrs ago one of our teachers we had told us what it made an hr and we did the math on how much it made for every minute it made 3cents per…. you are right a lot of teachers do stay after school to help kids that need extra help on things to get a better understand of it…. i have seen teachers stay after school for about 2hrs helping kids….
Bangor. And we all work hard. But we don’t all have summer’s off.
I agree we all work hard, and I am not saying that you don’t, but let me clear up another misconception. Teachers get paid for the time that they work, usually September to June. They can either choose to get paid biweekly stretching that pay out for the entire year (including the summer) OR they can have a lump sum paid to them at the end of June. Plus, many teacher work during the summer at another job, are taking graduate classes to work toward their certification that is due every five years (another $100+ to think about), doing workshops to improve their skills in the classroom and to bring new things back in the fall to the students, not to mention packing up their classrooms for the summer cleaning process to begin and then setting up their classrooms again after it’s done.
And I guess my other questions about this $40,000 in Bangor are this – How long has the teacher been there? Is that gross or net? Do they do any activities that they receive stipends for (coaching, math club, etc.). Is that for a teacher or is that for an administrator? There are a lot of unanswered questions that go along with this statement.
Yes, I know that pay is different around the state. My Parents both taught in poverty stricken areas and their pay didn’t even come close to what others are earning. As for those other incomes stated above – that is Southern Maine, where most of the time – and I am not saying all of the time, pay is usually higher, because cost of living is higher.
I get that you are trying to make people upset and to cause trouble for the reaction and if that what your ambition in life is so be it. We each choose who we want to be and what we want to be known for. I’m just happy to know that my Husband, Parents and Friends who are teachers have made differences in kids lives. That is the most important thing to me.
Not trying to get people upset – simply stating a fact, which seems to get people upset for some reason. Teaching is a great gig – it pays well, gives tons of guaranteed time off and is no more stressful than any other profession. The fact that most teachers stay in their careers for 20+ years is further evidence that it’s a great job (if it were has horribly self-sacrificing as we would be lead to believe, the turn-over rate would look something like a ‘normal’ profession).
Well bangorian it seems like your doing a good job upsetting people without trying. Maybe you should stand in the corner until class is dismissed.
AMEN. I’M SICK OF IT TOOO. UNLESS YOU HAVE BEEN IN A CLASSROOM, YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT TEACHERS GO THROUGH!!!! If teachers make 40,000 they are fortunate…even though I know most aren’t in it for the money. PLUS!!!! You would begrudge a teacher 40,000 and you are probably the same person…BANGORIAN…that sits and watches overpaid athletes be bad examples to our children. But you crab about our part time work…let me just tell you something…most of the teachers I know work part time jobs not as a supplement…but to help PAY THE BILLS. Bangorian, you must have been in trouble in school because it obviously was not a place you enjoyed being…
Correction…their full time work…full time plus++++
Just because you wouldn’t like to teach, doesn’t make it a sucky job. My hubby is an engineer. I would hate to do what he does, but he loves it. The point is, most teachers love what they do. Your point was its a sucky job so we should pay them more. It’s sucky to you, not most teachers so your argument is baseless.
We don’t have a teacher shortage, so the taxpayers are paying them at least what the employment market will accept. My gut says, it’s probably a lot more.
Teachers make different salaries in different parts of Maine. Teachers in the RSU 21 district make an average of $47K per year, plus benefits. Some make as much as $60K per year, plus benefits, if not more.
It’s different in various parts of the state.
It does differ in different parts of the state. I understand that because of cost of living. My point is people make teachers sound like they are making thousands of dollars a year and not working for it. And the plus benefits thing, if we were to add myself and our daughter on my Husband’s insurance we wouldn’t have enough to make our morygage payment. So instead she is on mine with a higher deductible. Every situation is different, every district is different and every teacher is different. To lump everyone together isn’t right.
A good teacher is priceless!I’ve been out of school for a long time and I remember teachers who took lots of extra time with kids,cared deeply about their students and made a difference everyday.I know of one teacher who very likely prevented a suicide.Of course there were always the few bad teachers but there are those in every profession.And now with the rules the way they are bad teachers don’t last.Sadly many who would be great won’t enter the field due to the scorn from the right wing.$40K is not enough,I wish you well.
1000 likes!
Buying products that one will use is cost effective when they also have the boxtops. That is the wise way to help the children.
I used to go to appliance stores to collect boxes rather than box tops. My kids used these to make play houses, trucks, cars, boogeymen, etc . They got more enjoyment out of these than any toy my wife and I ever bought them.
This is a truly sad way to fund public education.
Another this thing,,,why should the teachers half to buy supplies for the kids .
Many teachers pay a lot out of pocket and are poorly paid.Teachers need to be paid and respected a LOT more and not subject to interference from meddlesome problem creators.
Yes I know i would love to see the know it all in here teach for 3 months an i bet most would give it up in a week .
Um… check the maine heritage policy center’s database. Teachers no longer are poorly paid. They do quite well, and when you factor in summers off, weeks off here and there, retirement, gold-plated health care, etc. Well, they do much better than those funding their paychecks.
As if the MHPC doesn’t have an anti union anti teacher agenda.
MHPC political positions aside, they have an easy to use database tool populated directly from state records that show the actual pay of all state and municipal employees including teachers. Facts are just that. Facts. If anyone is curious to know if teachers are still underpaid (I agree they used to be), they can check it out themself and form their own opinion. They don’t need you or me to tell them what to think. Facts are facts.
Why? The companies get a tax deduction, the schools get cash to use in the classroom, and the local residents, parents and kids get to make a good, volunteer contribution to their schools.
This is exactly what the TPers want-forcing decent people to dig through trash so their kids can get an education instead of taxes paying for it.SAD.We waste money letting churches and big corporations skip taxes.SHAMEFUL.
I have some of the Box Top points that I will gladly contribute. Can we please get a name & address?
I, too, have quite a few Box Top Points, and bags of can tabs. Please post an address to mail them to. No dumpster diving required! :o)
If you’re in the Kennebunk area, there are two drop-off locations for Box Tops symbols:
1) Town hall, second floor, outside the Town Clerk’s office.
2) Kennebunk Library, just inside the door to the right, near the magazine table.
These collection sites were created by the Kennebunk Taxpayers Association, to help our local school district.
Look for the Box Tops logo on the collection containers.
http://mps.gaes.schoolfusion.us/modules/groups/homepagefiles/cms/750511/Image/images/PTO/LogoLifestyle.jpg
I am in the state of Maryland so will need to mail them….
Fact is Lisbon taxpayer’s pay too much for a police force.
Fact is the school budget is axed every year by the town council.
Fact is the citizen’s are held hostage by corrupt officials in the town.
Fact is they have a new Elementary school but have a sub-standard high school and was considered a doughnut hole under the not so great plan by the Baldheaded administration’s plan to revamp the schools across the state. And are standing alone.
Fact is Lisbon doesn’t even have a place big enough to hold high school graduation, they rent the armory in Lewiston every year.
Fact is taxpayer’s are being bent over a barrel to support other things in the community instead of for education.
Follow for yourselves before judging what is in the print media.
http://www.lisbonreporter.com
My hat is off to all the volunteers in Lisbon that are trying to help out and make a difference.
Way to go ladies, very proud of parents helping instead of complaining!!