Like this:

When I was a little girl, my mom would sometimes take me into the Teacher Store with her. I’m sure it had a name, but to me, that’s all it was. A store for teachers. You could buy anything from scratch-and-sniff stickers to first prize ribbons to border for bulletin boards. But my mom never bought very much there; she always said it was ridiculously overpriced. When I asked her why teachers would shop there if it was so expensive, I learned an important lesson about teachers: they may not be paid very much, but they will pay almost any price for all things teacher. It’s like a weakness that comes with being a teacher or something.

I stuck up my nose over such frivolity then, and I continue to stick it up now. Teacher world, meet Miss Frugal. First year Miss Frugal found all sorts of ways to save on teaching supplies. Don’t buy books; make friends with the librarian and get them from him. And why go to the Container Store and spend wads of cash on storage tubs when you can make cute matching tubs out of boxes and colored butcher paper? (That was my mom’s idea. I definitely recommend having a teacher mom. It’s fantastic.) But alas, Miss Frugal meets an expensive problem that sends even the thriftiest of teachers running to the dollar store and emptying out their coin purses on a regular basis… the prize box. As an essential and beloved component of every well-managed elementary classroom, keeping a prize box stocked is harder than it sounds. My first week of teaching, to my great delight, the teacher next door donated a huge bag of McDonald’s toys. But that only lasted about two months. And thus began the prize box saga.

Over the past year and a half I’ve come up with many solutions to this dilemma. Lure the kids away from the prize box by having as many free “prizes” as possible, and call them out before you call out the prize box option. Take your shoes off for a whole hour for only three dollars! Borrow a pillow or stuffed animal to read with! Read one of Miss Moore’s books! Going once, going twice? You get the idea. It’s a good strategy, but the kids are still drawn like magnets to the prize box, and they quickly realize what it means to save their money for bigger and better things. Last Christmas I even raised the price from five class dollars to seven, but it hasn’t deterred my determined kiddos one bit.

 So this year, I rolled up my sleeves and resolved to get to the bottom of this problem. No, I didn’t go to a garage sale or a thrift store. Those can be expensive, too; a quarter is a quarter, not to mention the time and energy that thrifty shopping involves. I went instead to my closet, and cleaned out everything I thought might be of some small worth in a first grader’s mind, asking my roommates and family members to do the same. Old bandanas, broken cell phones, you name it. Oh, Aunt Ruthann, are you getting rid of those canvas bags? I know of a good home for them… Hey, are you throwing away that Christmas light necklace? I can put it in my prize box. It doesn’t work? No matter! And so on and so forth, until I had a great collection of… junk. One man’s junk is every child’s treasure, I’m finding. My co-teachers laugh at me, because my kids sit in line after school each Friday, boasting about their empty pill bottles and talking on their broken cell phones. Yes, they got it all from my prize box. And Aunt Ruthann’s canvas bags? Well, let’s just say I had to have a little talk with my kids, because it became fashionable to give up their sturdy Spiderman and Barbie backpacks for the cheap prize box ones, which were definitely not made to support so many library books and folders. Let’s leave those at home, shall we, friends?

But recently I have run into another problem. You can only clean out your closet so many times. And you only see Aunt Ruthann a few times a year. Back to the Dollar Tree? No way, Jose. Surely there was another way. There’s always another way. Last Friday, the kids were complaining that the prize box was getting very low, and suddenly, it came to me. Voila. Why not set up my own thrift store? Why not make the kids supply their own prizes for the prize box? And so, nearly every morning since my adamant suggestion, kids have been bringing in stashes of old toys (which I’m positive their mothers have been more than happy to relinquish) and treasures. What’s in it for them, you say? Class money, of course. Hmm, Roberto. That looks pretty nice. I’ll give you three dollars for it, does that sound like a deal? Today, the first day our little thrift store prize box was open to the public, I watched as kids eagerly grabbed their classmate’s old, forgotten toys. I noticed that some of the treasures that had been in the prize box at the beginning of the year were even recycled back into the prize box, and even those were snatched.

Miss Frugal is happy. So are her kids, who are learning important values, like recycling and sharing and saving. I just have to wonder what the parents think when their kids come home with their prized junk. “Sweetie, what’s that?” “I have no idea, but isn’t it great?” Yep. That’s what happens when you entrust your naïve little baby into the hands of the thriftiest teacher you’ll ever meet.

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