Two months into the school year, Tye Haynes has already spent over $600 of his personal money on school supplies for his students at Booker T. Washington Senior High School in Overtown.
“I need paper, I need ink, I need tissues, I need napkins. ... It's just a lot of little things that you consistently always need to buy all the time,” he said. “So over time, it becomes very costly.”
Haynes, who teaches World History and AP Human Geography, expects to spend even more as the year goes on. Every year, he said, he spends over $1,000 out of pocket on school supplies.
His case is far from isolated. During the 2024-25 school year, K-12 teachers in Florida spent an average of $904 out of pocket on school supplies for their students, slightly more than the national average of $895. That’s according to a survey by the nonprofit organization Adopt A Classroom, which helps teachers raise money for school supplies through crowdfunding.
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“That number is not surprising at all,” said Antonio White, president of United Teachers of Dade, the union representing Miami-Dade teachers. “We live in one of the highest [cost of living] states in the country. We are at the bottom of the pay scale … and basically teachers do what's necessary to have their classroom prepared for children to enter.”
Adopt A Classroom surveyed 3,700 teachers across the country in the spring of 2025 through an online questionnaire. The survey results were released in June in what marks the sixth report released by the organization since 2015.
The report showed that the amount spent by teachers on school supplies in a school year has increased by 49% since 2015. Ryan Jordan, chief executive officer of Adopt A Classroom, pointed the finger at inflation driving up the costs of materials and at cuts in education funding.
“We are seeing certainly decreased budgets at a lot of our public schools, which is putting more of the burden on families for materials,” Jordan said. “And so that's just kind of unfortunately exacerbating the issue for families that struggle financially.”
The Miami-Dade County Public School District (M-DCPS) is among those that saw a tightened budget this year. In September, the school board approved a $7.4 billion budget for the 2025–26 fiscal year— down approximately $200 million from the previous year’s projected results, due in part to the expiration of post-pandemic relief funds. Public school advocates have also criticized recent state and federal policies they say are diverting funds away from public schools and toward charter schools and private school voucher programs.
Meanwhile, many categories of school supplies — including pencils, paper pads, and backpacks — are over 20% more expensive than they were pre-pandemic, according to a CNBC analysis of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' producer price index.
Financial burden
While classroom spending is a significant expense for teachers across the country — 20% of whom reported working a second job to make ends meet, according to Adopt A Classroom’s survey — in Florida, that issue is compounded by low pay.
The state ranked 49th out of 50 states for average teacher salary in 2023–2024, at $54,875, compared with a national average of $72,030, according to the National Education Association.
The financial burden can be even greater for educators who work in underserved communities, said Mindy Grimes-Festge, secretary-treasurer at United Teachers of Dade.
“If I'm at a school in a very wealthy, affluent neighborhood, I'm not buying much because the PTSA (Parent Teacher Student Association) and the parents are sending all kinds of stuff,” she explained.
At Booker T. Washington Senior High, where Haynes teaches, that kind of outside support is limited. The school, which was founded in 1926 as the first Black public high school in Miami, serves a high percentage of students from low-income families and receives federal aid as a result. Many of Haynes’ students, he said, face challenges such as limited internet access, lack of access to computers, and homelessness.
“I want my students to feel like they really have the opportunity to succeed and they don't have to worry about those things, because they're already coming at a disadvantage,” he said.
Dannielle Boyer, a former ESL teacher in Little Haiti and Liberty City who now serves as first vice president of United Teachers of Dade, said she spent over $2,400 on school supplies in a single year during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Teachers say state aid falls short
The State of Florida currently provides funding to teachers to help with the purchasing of school supplies through the Florida Teachers Classroom Supply Assistance Program. The amount provided to each teacher is determined each year through the General Appropriations Acts.
According to the 2025-26 budget, eligible teachers in Florida were allocated a minimum of $300 this year — higher than the national median of $200, according to Adopt A Classroom’s 2025 survey. The total received by the state program represents just under $5 million in M-DCPS’s tentative 2025-26 budget.
But teachers say that it’s still not enough.
“I think all of us use that $300 very easily,” said Haynes. “It's way better than nothing, but it goes really fast. Toner, ink, pencils, crayons. Mine was done within three weeks of the beginning of school,” he said.
In addition to the limited amount of funding provided, another shortcoming of the program is that its funds can only be used for supplies and materials, excluding other equipment teachers may need, such as printers or posters, Boyer noted. The program also does not extend to pre-kindergarten teachers.
“I think the issue is that the state does not fund public education the way public education needs to be funded. And so this is almost like a Band-Aid so that it makes them look like, ‘oh, we're doing something to help the teachers,’ when in reality it's not even a drop in the bucket of what teachers spend on their students,” said Grimes-Festge.
To bridge the gap, teachers turn toward other solutions like crowdfunding or grants. Haynes has used both in the past, on top of asking for donations of supplies from family and friends, he explained. In the past, he has used the crowdfunding platform DonorsChoose to get tablets to use in his classroom. He also once received a grant to buy a printer. This year, he has been using Adopt a Classroom, and so far has raised $250 towards his $273 goal.
But these initiatives are time consuming, Haynes pointed out.
“Although I spend $1,000 of my own personal money, if you count my time as money, I spend much more,” he said. He estimates he spends about 12 to 16 hours a year on grant writing, and an additional two to three hours a week shopping for supplies.
Ultimately, both teachers and advocates agree that what’s lacking is a long-term solution.
“What we do at Adopt A Classroom is a very kind of short-term solution to a systemic problem,” said Jordan. “We're filling gaps, but ideally you would create a society that valued education enough that those gaps weren't there in the first place.”
This story was produced by The Miami Times, one of the oldest Black-owned newspapers in the country, as part of a content sharing partnership with the WLRN newsroom. Read more at miamitimesonline.com.
