Game show winner provides scholarships

After raking in $23,500 on Who Wants To Be a Millionaire, a Mississippi Spanish teacher rewarded her honor society students with financial aid for school, as well as free opera tickets and a meal at a high-end New Orleans restaurant, The Court of Two Sisters.

"I told [show host] Meredith Vieira, with tears in my eyes that I wanted to bring my Spanish Honor Society to the opera. I'd have plenty of money to pay for it, because I didn't want them to have to worry about a thing," Deborah Bishop, the generous teacher, told the ABC affiliate television station WLOX. "I wanted to do this for them, because they're good kids. They work really hard in my class. They're honor students and they should have the best of the best."

In addition to these luxury field trips and three $500 scholarships, Bishop told the news source that she intends to contribute to charity and buy herself a few new pairs of shoes, although she told the station that she would prefer her husband not find out about the latter plan.

A follow-up report from the Huffington Post recited stories of other teachers who made personal sacrifices to aid their students. For starters, there's 28-year-old Liz Byron at Boston Public Schools, who has set out upon an "ultramarathon" through the Sahara desert in order to use the $50,000 winnings to purchase laptops for her 42 sixth-graders.

"It may seem like a crazy race," she told the news provider. "But what we attempt to do every day as teachers is a bigger challenge than trying to run 155 miles in the Sahara."

For yet another example, when a school in Chester, Pennsylvania ran out of money, a contingency of teachers offered to continue educating their students for no pay, according to the website Good. When one of the most outspoken among the teachers, Sara Ferguson, appeared on the Ellen DeGeneres Show, DeGeneres behaved not entirely unlike Deborah Bishop. The talk show host donated $100,000 to help the broke school continue.

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