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Both sides
By Tina2

I have been in your shoes...as a new teacher it's very frightening to think that the year will start and you'll have nothing to start it with. My first year/almost empty room situation taught me that it's really preferable
to build your room as you see the need. (The piddily little scraps of junk that WERE in there ended up never being used anyway, and quite frankly, took up the valuable storage space that I needed for the items I bought during the year.) When I changed classrooms, some teachers were begging for the stuff that the school did eventually purchase for my room (that I got to pick out BRAND-NEW

and beautiful from LAKESHORE catalog), others could not understand why I didn't MOVE the stuff TO my NEW classroom (which was COMPLETELY empty because it was previously unused until our county opened up Pre-K classes, which were funded by completely different monies). I would do neither, because A) I thought I shouldn't leave the new teacher with the same dilimma that I started with, and B) I believed that those items were purchased for that CLASSROOM with money alloted for that GRADE LEVEL. Long story short, the teacher who took over my old room TRASHED everything that I had scrimped and saved for over 6 years to get, and then left, so my school ended up refurnishing the room again. I should have emptied out the room, and saved the heartache that the other teachers had at the end of the year when they saw all that great stuff out in the hall for the custodians to carry off. Live and learn!