Dear future president,

My name is Mariela Ferreira I was born on March 21, 2000 Iam from the dominican rep. Iam attending Olney Charter High School. I am writing you this letter because I feel I like you need to help us with our school district problems. At this moment there could be a school getting shut down resulting to less students getting educated. Our school district is losing teachers, has less technology and less of pretty much everything. The lack of school funding is not just rubbing us but it's also taking our inspiration. Philadelphia would be such a better place to live in if we would increase school funding.

If we were to increase school funds, we would have more school supplies such as books, pencils, paper and computers. According to http://www.theatlantic.com/, “low income school district can’t buy books.” Philadelphia is the eighth largest school district in the country and it’s overwhelmingly poor. Our last mayor “Michael Nutter” gave out new books to school in the stubborns published by McGraw hill, and teachers from cities school gave students books from the big three publisher. “Big difference here” When the kids took the PSSA you could see a big difference from how the students from the stubborns responded from how the students in the cities responded. If we don't fix this now, things would just get worse. Students will graduate less prepared for the real world.

Philly schools have suffered a 40 percent decline in school nurses in just two years due to the budget cuts. On September 25, 2014, a 6th grader, Jessica Desvarieux, died of an asthma attack with no nurse on duty. As reported by http://therealnews.com, Jessica Desvarieux died shortly after returning back home. Do you think it’s fair that we are not meeting school standards because Philadelphia schools district owes money? It’s not fair to us, and it wasn’t fair for Jessica Desvarieux.That's why I urge you to influences the next president to help us so we don’t lose any more students.

Another school district problem is teachers leaving because of their less pay or because their union contract was broken. According to http://www.thebestschools.org/magazine/why-teachers-quit/ teachers are required to work alot of extra hours and not get pay for them. NEA reports, “the average teacher works about 12 hours a week outside of class grading papers, making lesson plans, doing lunchroom duty, and other job-related responsibilities. More than 40% of teachers report working over 60 hours a week. More than a quarter of teachers say they have a second job on top of all that in order to make ends meet.” It's not easy to wake up every morning at working 7-8 hours a day and still have to work extra hours after school with meetings and grading papers and school program, and still get pay the same amount of money. The school district is not considering are teachers or us. Without our teachers we wouldn't have this inspiration, this big dream we all wake up to wishing it would become reality already graduating going to college for examples.

I feel like my solution would make a positive effect in our city because kids wouldn’t drop out as much and that would give us hope to keep fighting for our education. To make this change you need to speak for us, I implore you to help us. What we could do is increase taxes of the wealthy, integrate students with different economics background and improve state education funding in terms of increased spending on public education.

Sincerely Mariela Ferreira