The CEO at the head of educational building block toy company Click-A-Brick, Georg de Gorostiza, says his decision to start offering a bulk discount to schools for the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) toy was partly inspired by the recent push by teachers to get fairer wages and have access to better resources for teaching.
“The tools that you use to teach children are just as important as the people teaching them,” de Gorostiza said. “We support their initiatives to get paid more in line with the importance of the work they are doing. Teachers have one of the most important jobs in the entire country -- maybe the most important by some measures. They are shaping our children’s minds and getting them ready for the future. They definitely don’t deserve to have to be working another job on top of the already strenuous career of teaching.”
De Gorostiza says he was touched by various reports he has read that many teachers actually pay for teaching tools and resources out of their own pockets for the classes they teach. To help alleviate this burden on teachers, Click-A-Brick recently started offering a bulk discount to schools so they can more easily afford the STEM toy for teaching their students and helping with valuable development.
The United States has been wracked recently by various walkouts and other demonstrations led by teachers calling for fairer pay. Kentucky and Oklahoma have recently seen mass rallies by teachers and West Virginia has also been affected recently by educators and support staff demanding pay raises because teachers’ pay has largely been stagnant for the past two decades. Funding for education has also been slashed in many states, leading to more teachers leaving the profession and fewer people entering the profession, according to the Learning Policy Institute.
De Gorostiza says he understands the teachers’ plight and it saddens him that children will ultimately be the ones to suffer if the situation isn’t rectified soon. While the CEO says he didn’t feel like there was a lot he could do, the bulk school discount seemed like a positive gesture and one that he felt obliged to make as the founder of an educational toy company. De Gorostiza says he hopes other educational toy companies throw their support behind teachers’ demands for a better living wage in similar fashion to that of Click-A-Brick, as helping students prepare for the future is every educational company’s concern.
