According to a survey of more than 3,000 teachers conducted by AdoptAClassroom.org, a nonprofit crowdfunding platform, teachers received a median classroom school supply budget of $200 last school year – an amount that 93% of the respondents said was not enough to cover their in-class needs.

Many teachers choose to subsidize the remainder of the costs, but it comes at a steep price. Out-of-pocket spending among teachers has increased by 44% since 2015, the survey found, with teachers reporting that they spent an average of $860 of their own money on supplies and other expenses during the 2022-2023 school year.

“Teachers spend their classroom supply budget fast,” Melissa Hruza, Vice President, Marketing & Development at AdoptAClassroom.org, told �鶹��Ʒ. “Even though they are willing to provide basic items like food and supplies for their students, their ability to pay for it is decreasing.”

One big reason: teacher pay has failed to keep up with the sky high rate of inflation in recent years. Adjusted for inflation, teachers are making $3,644 less than they did a decade ago, according to the National Education Association.

Communities and parents appear to be recognizing the challenges teachers face. AdoptAClassroom.org said its site has received more donations to teachers for the 2024-2025 back-to-school season than last year.

“Comparing July and August 2024 to the same period in 2023, the number of contributions to educators on AdoptAClassroom.org is currently up 13% from 2023 to 2024 so far this year,” Hruza said. “There’s also been a 9% increase in the number of both new fundraisers and total number of teachers with active campaigns.”

GoFundMe has seen a similar bump. So far this year, more than $12 million has been raised for K-12 education on the crowdfunding platform. In 2023, total funds raised for educators reached over $24 million — a 7% increase from the previous year.

“[P]eople don’t always see the hidden costs that end up on teachers’ hands, like providing additional resources for students who can’t afford small items like pencils,” Shawn An, a first-year earth and environmental science teacher at Julius L. Chambers High School in Charlotte, North Carolina, told �鶹��Ʒ.

To ensure he and his students were fully prepared for this school year, An launched a GoFundMe campaign called A Classroom for Future Scientists, with a goal to raise $1,000. He ended up receiving $1,045 in donations.

“What this funding created is the opportunity for me to bring the basic necessities into the classroom I need to succeed, like organizers and writing utensils to grade with,” An said. “It’s helped me create a space where I can be efficient and to find resources for students to engage in the work we’re asking them to do.”

Lightening the load

To help teachers afford the supplies they need, GoFundMe launched its own fundraising initiative called the Education Opportunity Fund. Since the fund’s launch in 2020, GoFundMe has raised more than $240,000 and has distributed more than 550 grants to teachers in order to help them afford classroom supplies and other educational resources, Leigh Lehman, GoFundMe director of communications, told �鶹��Ʒ.

“The grants were an additional step to offer help to educators and lighten their load a bit, and there are still grants available for teachers who are in need,” Lehman said.

Grants of can be put toward common classroom items like school supplies, books and class decorations. Funds can also be used for other educational resources or items like field trips, playground equipment, updated technology and extracurricular activities.

Similar to GoFundMe’s grant initiative, AdoptAClassroom.org provides funding through their Spotlight Fund Grants program. This program targets classroom initiatives that address things like social-emotional wellness, Indigenous language, arts, STEM education and racial equity. Eligible teachers can apply for grants of $750 or more on AdoptAClassroom.org.

“People all around the country want to find ways to help more teachers,” GoFundMe’s Lehman said. “They understand there is a gap in funding and that teachers are incredibly stressed.”

Keeping kids engaged

Hana Syed Khan, a fourth grade teacher in New Jersey’s South River Public Schools district, started her own GoFundMe campaign, A Classroom Built on Kindness, in August to support her efforts to make her classroom “as useful, accessible and hands-on as possible.”

Entering her fifth year of teaching at a new school in a new district, Syed Khan knew she had to be more creative with the amount of classroom space she has, materials needed and the resources available.

Her campaign raised $1,920 in funds, which she used to purchase a spin-the-wheel device, a carpet for reading time, books for the classroom library and the classroom staple Better Than Paper.

“The [kids] want to touch everything, and they should be able to. It’s their room,” Syed Khan told �鶹��Ʒ.

Through sharing via family group chats, her husband’s LinkedIn account, word-of-mouth and other social media platforms, like and , Syed Khan said she “feels fortunate to have set up the fundraiser and leverage community support for her classroom.”

She plans to keep her fundraiser open to donations so she can continue to afford classroom activities and incentives with hopes to keep students engaged through the year.

“Students in this district suffer from chronic absenteeism, which may stem from lack of transportation, parents’ schedule or a lack of motivation for themselves,” Syed Khan said. “Classroom incentives, like parties at the end of the month, are a really big part of what I want to use the funds for next.”

Drawing from his own school experience, An said he understands that many of his students face challenges outside of the classroom. Bringing smaller tools and supplies like writing utensils and paper to class is not the first thing on their mind.

“That can be a real barrier for students to access what teachers are asking them to do,” An said. “Using the donations to directly address those barriers helps students stay engaged to do their best in the classroom.”

He used a portion of the donations he has raised to purchase a rolling cart that allows for easy access to classroom supplies.

An and Syed Khan hope their efforts inspire other teachers to overcome the fear of asking for help. For Syed Khan, it was difficult to find the right words for the campaign and the video she included to go along with it. She wanted to ensure her classroom needs were as clear as possible to potential donors.

“Trying to figure out what to say to grab people’s attention was the most challenging part,” Syed Khan said.

“It definitely wasn’t easy,” she said. “But when people see someone speaking and explaining what the funds will be used for, it can attract many people because they see a real human.”

An experienced similar doubts about asking for help. He credits his family for providing feedback on his campaign narrative and helping him to frame his message.

“My family and I went through a co-writing process to get the point across that this was me, just as a person, asking a personal favor of people who were available,” An said.

GoFundMe currently hosts webinars for educators and education-related organizations to help them learn how to effectively fundraise. They’ve also updated their with tips for teachers to share their campaign and keep communities engaged.

“Seeing more teachers turn to external sources of funding to help support their students’ needs is definitely eye-opening,” An said. “It highlights the fact that not as much care is funneled into education as I think it should be.”

Without a foundational understanding of the relationship between numbers and quantities, Gaffney says, some students begin school “believing that math is almost a foreign language where they need to memorize answers to equations they’re seeing on the board.”

But to her, memorization is the wrong approach. Instead, she believes games and activities can help students recognize that the numbers in their lessons exist in real life. Once they make those connections, Gaffney thinks students will gain the understanding and confidence necessary to “figure out” basic math problems.

This way of thinking is what led her to help launch Heart Math Tutoring in 2013, which trains volunteer tutors to use toys and games to help students comprehend math.

Heart Math works with first through fifth graders in Charlotte, North Carolina, but has recently expanded to other nearby districts, including adding three South Carolina schools to its roster. This year, Heart is working with 26 schools in Charlotte.

Earlier this year, Heart received a $250,000 grant from the tutoring nonprofit Accelerate to expand their program. Accelerate previously told �鶹��Ʒ that Heart Math was selected for its use of volunteers, which can be a way to expand tutoring access. 

Gaffney said “the Charlotte community has been extremely generous to fund the program” and donated “over $5 million” to public schools through Heart Math Tutoring.

To sign up, schools need to identify at least 50 students who are in need of math intervention. Heart Math Tutoring offers a year-long program, which costs about $75,000 per school to deliver, according to Gaffney. But Gaffney said that through agreements with partners, who offset those costs, some schools pay only 5% to 15 % of that amount.

When schools sign up for the year, Heart Math sends a dedicated staff member to their buildings four days a week for two hours a day. The program also brings a team of volunteers, who each come once a week for one of those hours. Heart’s staff member supervises and oversees all tutoring sessions, while tutors work one-on-one with students. Each student gets 30 minutes with a tutor twice per week.

Prior to starting the interventions, there is a month-long period of onboarding where the Heart Math employee assesses students’ math skills to figure out where they need help. Then, tutoring lasts for eight months. Afterwards, Heart Math reports back data and progress to schools. 

Since officially launching 10 years ago, Heart Math Tutoring has served over 5,000 students. The program’s states that 97% have met its target for academic growth. According to Heart’s from September, last school year Heart served 1,072 students across 28 schools. Of those, 96% “showed growth on pre/post assessments.”

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools is one of Heart Math Tutoring’s oldest clients and has been working with the group for 13 years, prior to Heart establishing its own nonprofit in 2013. The district’s math specialists helped design the pilot version of Heart Math Tutoring in 2010, according to executive director of communications Susan Vernon-Devlin.

Vernon-Devlin said the 26 Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools that use Heart Math Tutoring “value both the academics and the one-on-one relationships that tutors build with our students.”

“Our schools consistently report positively about Heart Math Tutoring’s work with our students,” she wrote in an email. “Many teachers report that students return to class more confident, ready to help their peers, answer questions, and explain their thinking in math.”

Gaffney says Heart Math is “changing students’ beliefs about math, going from thinking that it’s something that has to be memorized to it’s something that they can figure out.”

From basic counting to multiplication and division, Heart Math puts students in charge of their own learning, Gaffney said. 

“We train our tutors instructionally to make sure the student is the one doing the work, meaning the student is the one touching the materials, the student is the one doing most of the talking,” Gaffney said.

This year is Elizabeth Darden’s fourth volunteering for Heart. As a communications professional, Darden doesn’t consider herself a math expert, but she said that the training from Heart Math and the guidance from its on-site staff prepared her to get the job done. 

“[Heart Math] makes it really easy for tutors because I mean, I think I’m decent at math, but definitely not in the math field or anything like that,” Darden said. 

Logan Henderson, who has volunteered with Heart for 10 years and is also a “financial supporter,” agreed that “you don’t have to be a math expert” to be successful.

Darden said most of the activities she does during tutoring are “fun, interactive games,” which she says excites her students.

“It’s kind of a treat when a student gets called for Heart,” Darden said. “None of them see it as something negative or embarrassing, and they always jump right up and come in to play.”

Darden said the games build confidence in her students and help them visualize math concepts. Two years ago, one of her students started “really struggling” and fell behind his grade level, but by the end, he won an award in his class for “most improved.”

Henderson, who works in finance, said that Heart’s approach to teaching math is different from how he remembered learning math when he was in school, where the focus was on memorizing math facts like multiplication tables.

“When I was a kid, it seemed like the focus was on memorization,” Henderson said. “There’s been a recognition, I think, that, ‘Hey, there’s visual learners,’ right, some learn better visually.”

Gaffney said that some of Heart’s older students are “two-three years behind in elementary math.” These students often “lack a concrete understanding” of “what numerals really stand for,” which is why making visual connections is important..

“By the time they’ve gotten to us, someone has already told them before many times that three plus four equals seven, but when you show them a pile of seven cubes, and you cover up three cubes and they’re seeing four, they don’t know how many are hiding,” Gaffney said. “So telling them that three plus four is seven again is not going to fix it.”

To gain that understanding, students need activities that can help them visualize and comprehend math problems, including counting and arithmetic with objects, according to Gaffney. 

“The important part is that they’re connecting numerals, abstract numerals, to concrete, hands-on things in the world,” Gaffney said.

The approach is supported by research. 

Dionne Cross Francis, a professor of education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who specializes in math education, said most students enter kindergarten with “some concept of quantity” and “a desire to quantify things,” but that there is wide variation in their levels of understanding. If these problems are left unaddressed, students can have difficulty learning other concepts, as well, she said. 

Cross Francis believes Heart Math has the right idea by emphasizing concrete activities early.

“Research would suggest that that’s where you start with children: that they actually have to be able to see one item and label it with the number-word one, and then continue to add additional items and label them with the appropriate number-word,” Cross Francis said. “We want to engage kids in really rich worthwhile experiences where they’re developing concepts from engagement with activities.”

Jo Boaler, an education professor at Stanford University and one of the author’s of California’s new math education framework, said that for too many students, learning math is a “completely abstract experience.” 

Boaler thinks students should “connect more with numbers in the world” to build understanding, which she says is supported by research.

“What separates the high achievers is that they are able to look at numbers in different ways, break them apart, see numbers inside numbers,” Boaler said. “The low-achieving students are just trying to remember memorized facts.”

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Overdeck Family Foundation provide financial support to Accelerate and �鶹��Ʒ.

Fifteen school districts, charter schools and tribal schools will share nearly $27 million in federal dollars to purchase 114 electric buses as part of the EPA’s Clean School Bus Grant Program, Gov. Roy Cooper announced Tuesday.

Cooper said in a statement that electric buses help protect children from harmful diesel fumes, cut carbon emissions, save money on bus maintenance and repairs, and create good jobs.

“This investment is good for our students, schools, economy and planet and I appreciate the Biden Administration for investing in our communities across North Carolina,” Cooper said.

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The state was awarded 31 buses under the Clean School Bus Program in 2022. Cooper’s administration funded 43 electric buses in 2022 through a settlement with Volkswagen. North Carolina received $92 million as part of a nationwide multi-billion-dollar penalty assessed by the EPA on the car company, which violated the Clean Air Act by cheating on millions of emissions tests.

North Carolina has added 188 electric buses within the past two years. The majority of the new buses will be sent to low-income, rural and/or tribal communities that serve more than 300,000 students in 13 counties.

Durham Public Schools will receive 38 buses, which is the largest share of the 114. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools will receive 27, Cherokee Central schools 15 and Kannapolis City Schools eight. Five buses have been awarded to two Durham charter schools — Maureen Joy Charter School will receive four, and Reaching All Minds Academy was awarded one bus.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. NC Newsline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Rob Schofield for questions: info@ncnewsline.com. Follow NC Newsline on and .

“They were both segregated middle schools,” said Akeshia Craven-Howell, who until recently was assistant superintendent of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, overseeing student school assignments. 

“Sedgefield Middle School serves students primarily from lower socioeconomic communities and Alexander Graham serves students from communities with primarily higher socioeconomic factors.”

But in 2019, the district, fueled by strong parent advocacy, tried something new. It mixed the two buildings’ student populations by creating a combined attendance area and rearranging which elementary schools sent students to which middle schools.

“We were able to create two middle schools that were much more socioeconomically diverse,” said Craven-Howell, who now works as an advisor for Bellwether Education Partners.

Across the country, thousands of schools closely resemble the segregated Sedgefield and Alexander Graham, a new U.S. Government Accountability Office reveals. 

Over 7,800 predominantly same-race schools, it finds, are located within just five miles of a different same-race school. Widening the radius to 10 miles swells the total to over 13,500. 

Those cases may represent “low-hanging fruit” for integration efforts, said Craven-Howell. 

“It doesn’t require a significant trade-off with home-to-school distance, which I think is often a barrier for some families when they think about school diversity.”

A strong majority of parents say they would like to see schools increase their racial and socioeconomic balance, but support wanes when the undertaking involves busing programs or further travel, according to from The Century Foundation. Opponents of integration schemes often cite lengthy bus rides in their resistance to the plans.

In many cases, however, such a sacrifice is not required, said Richard Kahlenberg, the organization’s director of K-12 equity.

“It’s so often true that people will say, ‘We would love integrated schools, but it’s just not logistically possible because of distances,’” he told �鶹��Ʒ.

That’s often a false dichotomy.

“Distance, in many cases, is not an excuse for segregation,” he said.

‘Wrong side of the tracks’

Roughly a third of the 13,500 schools identified in the federal report belong to the same school system as their counterpart campus, meaning possible desegregation efforts would lie directly in the hands of district leaders. 

Some 9 in 10 have a pair across district lines, which can entrench racial imbalances between campuses, said report co-author Jacqueline Nowicki. (The percentages, 32% and 90%, add to more than 100% because some schools have pairs both within and outside of their district.)

“Where we choose to draw school district boundaries, … that matters a lot as to where kids are going to schools,” the GAO education director told �鶹��Ʒ.

“School district lines are not God-given,” added Kahlenberg. Florida and several other states, for example, use large county-based school systems to help balance their classrooms racially and socioeconomically.

Using 2020-21 data, the most recent figures available from the U.S. Education Department’s Common Core of Data, Nowicki’s team found that over a third of U.S. students — roughly 18.5 million — attend predominantly same-race schools. They applied the “predominantly same-race” label to schools where students of a single race or ethnicity make up at least 75% of the enrollment. The percentage of highly segregated U.S. schools decreased slightly from 2016, the last time the GAO investigated the issue. But given increases in diversity over that time span, including more students who identify as Asian or Hispanic, the researcher doesn’t see the numbers as particularly encouraging. 

The share of students of color attending highly segregated schools, which tend disproportionately to also be high-poverty schools, ticked up, she pointed out. Those campuses, on average, have worse academic outcomes compared to their wealthier peers.

“What does it mean, in a country that’s increasingly becoming more diverse, to have large portions of kids going to school only with other kids who look like themselves?” said Nowicki.

The reasons why the U.S. continues to have divided classrooms stretch far into the past, her agency’s report explains. In one major example, redlining, a federal 1930s practice of denying home loans to borrowers of color while supplying them to white candidates, systematically reduced Black homeownership and codified racial divisions between neighborhoods. The impacts of the discriminatory policy continue to haunt education outcomes to this day. 

“This is where phrases like ‘the wrong side of the tracks’ have come from,” said the GAO director.

‘The city that made desegregation work’

In the case of Charlotte-Mecklenburg, the recent school integration push comes on the heels of a back-and-forth history after Brown v. Board of Education.

Charlotte was as “the city that made desegregation work.” After the landmark 1971 Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education ruling upheld the district’s busing scheme, the city’s integration plan became a model for cities across the southern U.S. — which in the current day are than other regions of the country.

“Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s proudest achievement of the past 20 years is not the city’s impressive new skyline or its strong, growing economy. Its proudest achievement is its fully integrated schools,” the Charlotte Observer editorial board in 1984.

But after a 1999 decision struck down court-mandated desegregation requirements, campuses in the area quickly became — with between its 180 schools.

In 2014, the area received sobering news: a by Harvard University researchers ranked Charlotte dead last out of 50 American cities in upward mobility, or the likelihood of low-income youth rising out of poverty.

The report blamed two main factors for the abysmal assessment: racial segregation and school quality.

“One of the predictors of low levels of social mobility is school and neighborhood segregation,” explained Kahlenberg.

When the 140,000-student district resurrected decades-old conversations on how to integrate its schools, the memory of past efforts remained vivid for many residents. There was an appetite for the changes, but they still proved difficult, said Craven-Howell. In merging communities that had different socioeconomic makeups, the district had to be careful to make sure the voices and needs of wealthier parents did not drown out those of lower-income families.

But the effort has been a success thus far, said the former Charlotte-Mecklenburg administrator, and they have begun to move the needle on integration. However, they affect only a small share of campuses. She hopes the district will continue to build on its progress and “identify opportunities to replicate some of the great work that was done six years ago,” the last time it reviewed student school assignments.

Charlotte is not alone in the push. The district is a member of The Century Foundation’s , a network of 27 school systems, 17 charter school networks and 13 housing organizations across the country undertaking efforts to chip away at segregation in their schools and communities. Though they account for only a tiny fraction of the 13,500 segregated school pairs identified by the GAO report, Craven-Howell believes they demonstrate what’s possible. 

“There are districts all over the country who are thinking about [integration], who are trying things,” she said. “It’s not the case that a district has to embark on this work without there being any models or examples to look to.”

And as for Sedgefield and Alexander Graham, the Charlotte middle schools that combined their student bodies in 2019, the change has worked, said Craven-Howell.

“People don’t think about it as the two schools and the two communities that paired. They really have become a single community.”