Second grade teacher Demetria Richardson spends so much on school supplies she has a designated credit card to cover classroom expenses. Just don’t tell her husband what the balance is, she said. Usually, the 26-year veteran educator in Richmond, Virginia, spends about $500 on back-to-school items. Over the past month, she has already topped that — and she’s not done shopping.
Crowdfunding on DonorsChoose, a nonprofit that lets individuals fund public school classroom projects, helps Richardson cover some of the costs on items like dry erase markers, pencils and printer ink. The school supply-stuffed backpacks that local churches distribute to families before the school year also help, Richardson said. Yet, none of this assistance stretches far enough to prevent teachers like her from dipping into their own wallets to serve students.
While covering the cost of classroom supplies is a challenge educators face annually, the burden on them has grown as the price of many learning materials has jumped by 20 percent in roughly five years.
“By the end of September,” Richardson estimated, the total on her credit card for school is “probably going to be close to $1,200.”
President Donald Trump’s tariffs on foreign goods — and the supply chain disruptions that resulted — have partly been blamed for driving up the cost of school supplies. His freeze of over $6 billion in education funding on July 1, which he reversed before the end of that month, added to the problem by preventing schools, including Title I schools with large populations of economically disadvantaged students, from stocking classrooms with learning materials well ahead of the academic year.
“It’s hard to understand that teachers have to buy all these supplies for themselves, for their classrooms and for students,” said Emma García, principal researcher for the Learning Policy Institute, a nonprofit that conducts research to improve education policy and practice. “I don’t think there’s any other profession in which the professional has to shoulder the supplies or the materials. But for teachers, it’s taken for granted that they will be there, that they are going to do the work no matter what.”
Research indicates that virtually no educators are spared from spending their own money on their classrooms, according to García. Teachers at high-poverty schools told The 19th that, in addition to Trump’s tariffs and funding freeze, other factors have contributed to them paying more for goods. They pointed to the COVID-19 pandemic, when they saw prices start to rise and a cultural and economic shift in which students returned to class with few to no supplies, a trend they say persists today.
“This year has definitely been a huge challenge because typically the schools would be able to give us some of the basics, like a stapler, pencils, paper,” said Emmanuela Louis, who teaches English Language Arts for Miami-Dade County Public Schools. School officials “haven’t been able to give us anything, so it’s like we have to rely heavily on DonorsChoose to even get resources for the kids to start the school year. It pretty much puts the most vulnerable kids at risk.”
Through it all, teachers have served as the safety net children can count on when the system breaks down. Educators have taken on debt, found extra work and gone without much-needed personal items to prepare their classrooms — and their students — for another school year.
Personal Sacrifices
For Richardson, shelling out hundreds of dollars of her own money on school supplies means she won’t be able to buy the $150 pair of stylish Vionic orthopedic shoes that make it easier for her to stand all day.
“People think that we don’t like to look nice, too,” Richardson said. “We want to get a new back-to-school outfit, too, or a pair of shoes. But when it comes to our students, our students come first, and we go on the back burner.”
Louis knows the feeling: Some years she has barely been able to afford back-to-school footwear and apparel herself. During others, she has gone without these items entirely because she had funneled so much money into her classroom at Jose De Diego Middle School in Miami. Although her district provides her with a $300 school supply stipend, a purchase as mundane as copy paper devours those funds instantly, she said.
“Three hundred dollars doesn’t go far at all,” said Louis, who has taught for 16 years. “When you’re thinking of supplies — folders and things like that — they’re not cheap. You’re buying at least three folders per student just to keep their items organized. Paper is also a necessity to copy things for them. We do have laptops, which kind of helps, but they don’t always go home with them, so they definitely need tangible items in their hands to write and copy things down.”
Altogether, Louis estimates that during any given school year, she spends about $2,500 to $3,000 on her classroom and students. And that doesn’t include the money the mother of two spends on supplies for her own children, a third grader and a ninth grader.
Richardson’s classroom expenditures aren’t far behind, as she has spent as much as $2,000 outfitting her classroom at Henry L. Marsh III Elementary in Richmond throughout the school year. That’s well above the average educators spend on supplies, DonorsChoose has found, backing up previous research that revealed teachers at high-needs schools have more out-of-pocket expenses.
“We ran a teacher survey earlier this spring, and we noticed that teachers are spending, on average, $655 of their own money on school supplies for their students and for their classroom,” said Kristina “Steen” Joye Lyles, vice president of equity and impact at DonorsChoose. “That’s an increase from what teachers reported last year, which was $610.”
Without DonorsChoose, Lyles said, teachers reported that they’d be spending over $1,400 of their own money on school supplies annually. “So, this is a trend that we’re watching closely.”
García said paying for school supplies compounds financial pressures for teachers, who earn lower salaries compared with professionals in other careers that require college or graduate degrees. Moreover, teachers often take on student loan debt just to enter the field. Given this, any out-of-pocket costs are “going to be more burdensome for a teacher than for a non-teacher” covering work-related expenses, García contends. And the $300 deduction for classroom expenditures educators can claim on federal income tax returns hardly levels the playing field.
Richardson has felt obligated to subsidize her students’ needs with her own money because she teaches at a Title I school where nearly every pupil qualifies for free or reduced-price lunch. Some years, most of her classroom expenses have gone toward snacks for students.
“Some parents send their own snacks, but we do have a lot of kids whose parents don’t, so we hate to see them sitting there needing that extra boost of energy but not having it,” she said. “You’re talking about snacks for maybe 20 kids, five times a week. That does add up.”
Also adding up is the rising cost of school supplies. This year, Richardson has paid more for crayons, glue sticks, composition books, folders and other materials than she remembers paying in recent years.
“I used to get folders for 50 cents apiece,” she said. “Now they’re almost 95 cents a folder. We used to be able to get boxes of crayons, but we can’t get them in bulk at the dollar store anymore. They said supply is low. Now, they’re like almost $2 for a 16-count box.”
Louis can no longer afford to give each of her 125 students a small box of crayons, along with a kit filled with rulers, index cards and highlighters. This year, she said, groups of four students will have to share these school supply kits. Sharing them means that her students can’t take the kits home to complete their schoolwork.
Since her students are required to wear uniforms consisting of polo shirts and navy or khaki pants, Louis has also spent her own money to make sure her sixth graders, many of whom come from migrant families who can’t afford more than one uniform, have multiple sets of these clothing items.
“The uniforms have gone up tremendously,” she said. “It used to cost $6 or $7 for a shirt. Now they’re between $9 to $12.”
As classes resumed in Richmond, Richardson had already spent $200 on composition books and $400 on durable headphones for her students that wouldn’t break like the cheap ones she had in her classroom last school year. New whiteboards and dry erase markers were also on her list.
A mother of four — the youngest of which is a college senior in need of her own supplies — Richardson said she’s fortunate enough to have children who pitch in to help her obtain learning materials.
“They always say, ‘Hey, Mom, I picked up some crayons for you,’ or ‘Mom, I picked up some pencils. Mom, you always said the kids never have scissors,’” Richardson said. “I’m so blessed that they do look out for me.”
The Empty Backpack
Reflecting on the start of her teaching career, which coincided with the turn of the 21st century, Richardson noticed a stark difference compared with today in how parents respond to the annual supply list her school sends out.
“Earlier in my career, parents would send everything on the school supply list, and then they would send extras just in case,” she said. “If your tissue box supply ran low, you could reach out and they would replenish it.”
Today, however, students will get free book bags from community events and bring nothing more than the bag and the supplies in it — usually one notebook, one pack of paper, one box of crayons — to school with them, Richardson said.
“If we’re lucky, that’s what they have,” she said.
Out of 125 students, Louis said that she expects “maybe not even 20 percent” to show up to school with the supplies they need. That’s about 25 students.
The COVID-19 pandemic marked a turning point, ushering in mass job losses and supply chain disruptions that made it difficult for families to pay for essentials like rent and food, let alone school supplies. When students returned to class after remote learning, many stopped bringing the items on supply lists, teachers told The 19th.
“So we tried to minimize what was on the list to be just the necessities,” Richardson said.
At her high-poverty school, most students show up with half the supplies on the back-to-school list, while about a quarter arrive completely empty-handed, she said. Some parents question why students need items like resealable plastic baggies, dry-erase markers or hand sanitizer, so they don’t purchase them. Others just haven’t been able to find items on the supply list, like the clear or mesh book bags required since July 2024 by Richmond Public Schools.
To supplement her income and easily provide her students with the appropriate learning materials, Richardson has in the past taken on extra work — teaching summer school and working as a tutor and facilitator. Doing so, she said, gave her “extra money all year round to offset what I spend in my classroom.” A DonorsChoose survey revealed that nearly half of teachers report having a second job.
“So, again, we’re just seeing this heightened level of teachers going above and beyond to be able to stay afloat during a time when things are getting really expensive,” Lyles said.
Jodi Hanauer, an ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) teacher at Juniata Park Academy in Philadelphia, has previously picked up more work, which, in part, helped her buy school supplies.
“I took on a part-time job just to pay the bills for several years,” the 22-year educator said. “I was an online ESOL teacher at night and during the weekends. I was teaching kids and adults English in countries like China, Japan and [places like] Hong Kong.”
The extra income she earned then marked the rare time buying school supplies, for which Hanauer pays between $500 to $1,000 annually, didn’t hurt financially. Like Louis, her school district provides her with a small stipend to cover learning materials, but the $200 doesn’t begin to compensate for the expenditures she makes working at a high-poverty school.
Title I funds from the federal government help schools with economically disadvantaged students to cover supply costs. But Trump’s funding freeze in July held up Title I funding, delaying schools from getting their supply orders processed well before the new academic year.
“We haven’t been able to receive the order for this school year yet, so we’re hoping that will get cleared up soon,” Richardson said.
The Limits of Crowdfunding
DonorsChoose helps teachers like Richardson avoid financial collapse.
She’s currently seeking donations for basic school supplies like pencils and ink for the classroom printer. She’d also like clay to help her students do classroom projects that develop their fine motor skills.
But DonorsChoose, Richardson said, is not a permanent solution to the long-standing pattern of teachers covering school supplies.
“It takes a while for the projects to be funded and then the materials to be shipped to us,” she said. “If we need poster boards for our students to do a history project, and we need them in the classroom on Friday, I have to go out and purchase 18 poster boards to make sure that all of my students have one.”
For Hanauer, DonorsChoose is no guarantee she will get all the school supplies she needs. She currently has a campaign to give prizes — which have previously included fidget spinners and high-end pens, pencils and erasers — to students who make positive behavioral choices.
“Putting up a DonorsChoose project is like a dream,” she said. “You are dreaming of getting things, and it’s great if that happens, but if you absolutely need something now or in one week, then you’re going to have to come up with the money yourself.”
For 12 years, Louis has used DonorsChoose to subsidize her classroom expenses. Since many of her students are English learners, it’s imperative that her classroom be a print-rich environment. But educational posters can cost $35 apiece, an expense that can quickly balloon. Crowdfunding on DonorsChoose has helped her cut down on these costs. She’s also used the site to fund field trips. She’s currently crowdfunding for a file cabinet and poster machine ink that can cost up to $500.
Although teachers make countless sacrifices to kick off the school year and maintain their classrooms as the months unfold, Louis knows that the public is largely unaware of how much educators personally contribute to school supply lists. Every item in a classroom, she said, has been designed with one goal in mind: facilitating student learning.
“So, please be gentle with teachers,” she asked, urging families to provide any learning materials they’re capable of buying. Teachers who pour money into their classrooms, she said, do so “out of the kindness of our heart, because we really enjoy what we do.”
