NYC schools Announce Christmas Gift Spending Rules for the Upcoming Holiday Season

New York City schools recently announced new spending rules for Christmas gifts during the upcoming holiday season. According to NYC Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein, whole imposed the gift giving rule earlier this year, parents who want to buy Christmas gifts for teachers have a new $5 per student spending limit.

The new rule is part of the conflict-of-interest section of the New York City Chancellor's Regulations, with the intention of aiding students who can not afford to make money contributions to class gifts, officials said. The regulations also state that individual gifts from students or parents to school employees should be "principally sentimental in nature and of insignificant financial value."

Reactions to the new Christmas gift spending rule have been mixed. Several teachers and parents have declared the rules are examples of the Department of Education's mismanagement and could potentially send messages to teachers that they are underappreciated.

"I don't quite see the rationale to denying teachers a gift," said Mr. Klein, whose has a son in first grade. "We're not trying to curry favor with the teacher."

Some teachers said a christmas or holiday gift was one of the few perks they could count on. One teacher, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said she wanted students to "give as much as they want to give."

"At lunch, when I was talking to other teachers, some of them were saying things about how nice it is when kids make them something," the teacher said. "I was like, 'Give me the big gift certificate.' "
She said she was worth more than a $5 gift, adding "there's been no raise. I'm broke all the time."

When asked how the New York City schools would go about enforcing the Christmas gifts spending limit, Mr. Klein said: "We should try to do this in a way that's sensible. I think we leave it to the judgment of parents."

Mr. Klein said that if everyone used common sense, the christmas holiday gift-giving tradition would "not become some sort of flow of cash or other gift ideas that could be misconstrued."

Perhaps Lindsay Hershenhorn, a teacher at P.S. 321, summed the situation up most succintly, "Teachers should be paid enough so that parents don't feel they need to give gifts to teachers and teachers don't feel they need to accept them."