The old adage “Nothing in life is free” goes double for supposedly free public education. What better to remind us of that than a new education calculator that tells us exactly what our primary school education cost — and what it costs to provide it for a child in Uganda?
Head to Calculateit.org to try it out.
Anyone born prior to 1999 can enter their year of birth, state of residence and whether they went to public or private school to get the estimate.
I just found out that it took $52,716 for me to attend my public elementary school in Kentucky in the ’90s. Then came the sobering second part: that kind of money could provide 171 African kids with a primary education. To send a child in Africa to the first through seventh grades is just $350 a year. The site then provides options to pay it back karmically: donate or fundraise. Click around and you’ll learn that a brick for a school costs $1 and that a chalkboard costs $125.
The calculator is an effort by Building Tomorrow, an Indianapolis-based social-profit organization that encourages young people to support the construction of primary schools throughout sub-Saharan Africa. It has more than 20 college chapters and partners with the high school service organization the Key Club.
The data comes from the National Center for Education Statistics. My $52,716 includes the school property, building maintenance, the library and the computer lab, staff salaries, and the cost of health and speech services.
Building Tomorrow Assistant Director for Partnerships Maggie Kirkpatrick summed it up when she said, “In America, we’re lucky.” In sub-Saharan Africa, almost a third of young people are not in school.
The organization has already provided classrooms for more than 2,000 students in Uganda. Great! Now just 4,988 more classrooms are needed in that country alone before 2015. Oh. Today’s lesson: there’s a lot to be done.
Photo by Matt Lucht via Flickr.