Constable: Teachers spend summer working for fall

On a glorious summer day while commuting to work, driving as part of work or being stuck in a cubicle actually working, some folks might daydream about being a teacher. The fantasy has you whiling away the morning in bed, popping bonbons and binge-watching TV before moseying to the pool and throwing back margaritas until dinner. After all, teachers have that luxurious three-month vacation at taxpayers' expense, think some people.

"I used to be the same way," admits Ann Poleretzky, a Lake Zurich woman who got a real education about education when her daughter, Nicole Defort, became a teacher.

"Once you come out of school, you start focusing on going back to school," Poleretzky says of her daughter and other good teachers. "As soon as they waxed her floors (at the end of the past school year), she was looking ahead, thinking of how to get up her bulletin boards and get everything ready for the next school year."

That's why Poleretzky is spending a beautiful summer day shopping at the Lakeshore Learning Store in Palatine. Using her own money, Poleretzky buys colorful "finishing borders, for outside the classroom and inside," just to brighten up the second-grade room where her daughter will teach at Cotton Creek School in Island Lake, which is part of Wauconda Unit District 118.

"That's that 'it takes a village' philosophy. It really is a family effort," says Defort, a single mom from Port Barrington who also gets help at school from her 12-year-old-daughter, Emma, and sons Tyler, 13, and Kyle, 9.

"We're going to have a solid three weeks of moving," Defort says, explaining how she's transferring much of her stuff from her old fourth-grade room to the new second-grade classroom where she'll start teaching in the fall. The $25 stipend she is allowed to spend on her classroom doesn't come close to buying all the posters, decorations, prizes and even books.

Defort keeps some plastic bins of books at her house and stores others in her parents' basement.

I understand that concept of a teacher spending his or her own money on books for students because I spent part of the weekend helping to clean out my recently deceased mother-in-law's home office. During her career as an elementary school teacher, she had purchased hundreds of books - including hardback encyclopedias, expensive photo books about outer space, easy-to-read educational books about dinosaurs, presidents or the five senses, books showing how to draw horses or race cars, and dozens of paperbacks about heroic dogs, scary mysteries and popular actors, musicians and athletes. All of them bought with her own money, and all of them personally signed with "Mrs. TerHorst" so that they wouldn't end up in a wrong classroom.

Teachers spend $1.6 billion each year on "extras" for their classrooms, according to a 2013 survey by Education Market Association. Lakeshore partners with the charity DonorsChoose.org to help teachers pay for supplies not covered by a school budget. Even on a day made for goofing off outside, a steady stream of teachers files into the Lakeshore Learning Store to buy goodies for the fall.

"I actually have today off, but I was passing by," says Natalie Wishne of Wauconda, who spent 15 years as an elementary school teacher in Palatine Township Elementary District 15 and has spent the last 14 years as principal at Three Oaks School in Cary. Unable to wait until Lakeshore's "Back to School" sale, which starts July 5, the principal buys a giant bag filled with posters for spots outside classrooms.

"My staff rocks it. But I always like to get things to spruce up the halls," Wishne says. "I've got fun, welcoming and inspirational things, like this poster about how to be a good friend."

There probably are a few teachers kicking back this summer, but a great teacher works far beyond August through May, Monday through Friday or 8 a.m. until 3 p.m.

And that takes more than private money. It takes a passion for teaching kids to learn.

"I love it," says Wishne, who, after 34 years in education, still spends a rare free day in June buying supplies for work in August. "The start of the new school year, you still love it."