Texas Teachers Bear The Burden Of Supplying Classrooms

Texas is the state where teachers spend most out of their own pockets to supply their classrooms. Meanwhile the Legislature remained reluctant to increase funding for public schools thanks to their focus on vouchers.

Every year, Texas teachers spend, on average, $1,396 of their own pockets to supply their classrooms, according to a survey from CouponBirds. The state leads the nation in spending from teachers, and with rising prices, it’s more notorious that the legislature has done nothing to help them.

“My wife is a science teacher, and the $300 tax refund for teachers who spend their own funds on school supplies is woefully short of her actual out-of-pocket expenditures every year,” David Kelly, from Spring wrote in a letter to the Houston Chronicle. His wife, Sherry, has expressed that it is frustrating that students sometimes miss out critical lessons because she can’t buy everything.

Sherry teaches at a Spring ISD Title I school, where about 80% of the students are from low income families. She told Regina Lankenau from the Houston Chronicle that families can’t afford classroom materials, and the process to ask materials to the district is time-consuming, often achieving zero results.

She said that it is difficult to acquire the necessary chemicals for some experiments, and that leaves unprepared students for the Advanced Placement chemistry tests.

“It’s not the fault of the district, it’s the fault of the state,” she told the Chronicle.

A report from the Texas Education Agency showed that, when accounting for inflation, school funding has decreased since Gov. Greg Abbott took office.

“Last year, the Legislature chose not to spend much of the record $32.7 billion surplus that could have injected more funds into school budgets,” Lankenau wrote in an op-ed. “Instead, Abbott forced lawmakers to waste time squabbling over whether to fund private education with taxpayer dollars.”

With the legislature focusing on school vouchers, teachers and students are left in the darkness with underfunded districts. This year, at least seven districts are facing multi million-dollar deficits.

Sherry begged lawmakers to do their work and address the school funding problem, because if the public schools can’t do their job everybody suffers.

“They need to take the politics out of it and do what’s right for students,” she said. “Public schools are the only thing standing between success and chaos for many kids.”