I just came from buying the textile paint you required for the integrated project, which cost P48.00 per jar, or roughly P150.00 for all three colors you specified. Unless the intention is to cover the entire shirt three times over with fabric paint, there is no way all three jars will be used up. There is no assurance there will be another project requiring fabric paint of the same colors, so we’d most likely end up with unused fabric paint that will most likely dry up and go to waste. At P150.00 per student, times 20 or so students, that’s about P3,000.00 of hard-earned money wasted in one section alone! Nakakapang-hinayang!

I also have issues about having more art materials to store. Across FOURTEEN years of having school-aged children, I have accumulated so much clutter from poster paint, construction paper, modeling clay, cartolina, etc left over from previous school projects, because having students buy materials individually has been standard practice in the schools my children attended.

May I please request then, if you don’t mind, that for future projects, to just assign students to bring materials they can pool and use as a group, rather than having them each buy ALL the materials for themselves? This way it will be more economical for parents and there will be less material left over after the project-making. In addition, we get to teach children, by example, the value of sharing, resourcefulness and thrift instead of encouraging a ‘buy and buy more’ attitude.

Personally I wouldn’t mind just sending money to pay for my child's share in the materials to be used. I suppose some of the other parents would feel the same way, since that would save us time, energy and gas (or fare) than if we were to go out and buy the materials ourselves.

In fact, if you could inform us weeks in advance about the materials the class would need for their projects, maybe some parents, myself included, will be glad to send over materials we already have at home for the class to share. This way we spare other parents the unnecessary expense, and we are able to put to good use things just lying around in the house or in storage.

I hope you would kindly look at these points under the spirit of open-mindedness and continuous improvement, but please let me know if I am asking too much.

God bless.