There’s a decent chance that the assortment of items in any North Carolina public school classroom (pencils, rulers, even those ever-popular “hang in there!” inspirational cat posters) were paid for out of the pocket of a teacher making a starting salary of $41,000.
Tools4Schools, organized by nonprofit WakeEd Partnership, is one of the local programs hoping to cover some of those costs.
“In our first two years, we gave away $1.6 million in new school supplies,” Keith Poston, president of WakeEd, told INDY at a media event organized by Raleigh congresswoman Deborah Ross at WakeEd’s Capital Boulevard location, which looks sort of like the school supply section of a small department store. “There’s 10,000 teachers in Wake County, last school year we served more than 5,000 of them.”
Alliyah Everette, a restorative learning lab instructional assistant at the Wake County Public School System (WCPSS), was one of those educators who showed up to pick up some free equipment this week.
“It’s really important just to get stocked up on those necessities,” Everette said, looking at boxes of markers. She estimates that she spends several hundred dollars a year on supplies each year. As she moves around the well-stocked shelves, she keeps track of the “cost” of items, recorded in points.
Educators get 100 points per visit, and can make one visit per quarter. Small items, like a pack of markers or a canister of Clorox wipes, cost only a few points, while bigger grabs like a large sticky-note easel could be upwards of 40.
“Everytime a teacher comes in the shop they typically leave with anywhere from $150 to $200 worth of supplies,” said Poston. Durham’s DPS Foundation similarly just finished up its annual Crayons2Calculators “Fill that Bus” challenge, which the organization estimates helped teachers save an average of $419 last year.
Even with the help of organizations like WakeEd and DPS Foundation, teachers across the state will fork over an estimated average of $1,600 this year on supplies for their classrooms. That’s among the highest in the nation—in a state that also has some of the lowest teacher pay.
And prices are only going up, as noted by representative Ross, who stopped by the supply store to bag some erasers for educators and to rail against Republicans at the state and federal level.
“It’s been going up because of inflation. It’s been going up because of the tariffs, because a lot of school supplies are not made in the United States of America,” said Ross. “Congress and the [state] legislature have not been providing enough money for our public schools, and in some cases, clawing that money back. That is simply wrong.”
Poston said that, barring a “sustained, significant investment” from the state and federal government, nonprofits and the private sector will have to keep stepping up as much as possible to bear the costs for students whose families may not be able to afford supplies.
“We’d rather not be doing this. We’d rather be focusing on literacy or something else. But in the meantime, we’re going to be here to help our teachers,” said Poston. “If the teachers don’t have what they need, they can’t teach, and if students don’t have what they need, they can’t learn.”
Reach Reporter Chase Pellegrini de Paur at [email protected]. Comment on this story at [email protected].