What It’s Actually Like Parenting A Kid At An Average Underfunded Public School In America
I was 10 minutes early for my 4th grade parent-teacher conference last month, leaning against the cinder block wall outside Milo’s classroom, when I watched Ms. Henderson tape a broken desk leg back together with gray duct tape. The student who used it had dragged it in from the playground that morning after the leg split on the cracked asphalt, and there was no custodian available to fix it until the end of the day – our school only has one custodian for 320 kids.
I squeezed into the tiny student chair by her desk, its own leg wobbly enough that I had to brace it with my foot, and she pulled out Milo’s writing and math samples. Halfway through, she tapped the stack of drawings Milo had tucked at the back. “He’s really talented with drawing,” she said. “Keeps asking when we’ll get more watercolors. We’ve got three good brushes between 28 kids, and half the paint tubes are dried out.”
I nodded, and thought back to December, when the boiler went out for three days straight. Milo came home that first afternoon with his gloves stuffed in his coat pockets and his fingers blue from sitting in a 58-degree classroom. Ms. Henderson laughed when I brought it up, and said she’d brought three space heaters from her basement to keep the kids warm, then got a warning from the district for violating fire code. There was no money to fix the boiler until after the new year, so what else was she supposed to do?
A lot of people hear “underfunded school” and picture a crumbling building in a major city with a massive student body. This is just average, here. Lincoln Elementary serves 320 kids in a mid-sized college town in Indiana, property tax revenue has been flat for a decade, and the state cuts more from the education budget every other year. We don’t have toxic mold or a collapsing gym that makes the evening news. We just have slow, steady rot: one program cut a year, one broken desk left unrepaired, one position not refilled when someone retires.
After we went to a school board meeting two years ago and left with nothing but promises that funding would improve “when the economy picks up,” a group of us started trying small, low-effort things that don’t require waiting for politicians to act. The first thing we dumped was the annual wrapping paper fundraiser, where 80% of the money went to the fundraising company and only wealthy parents bought anything anyway. Now every teacher posts a public Amazon wish list linked directly to our closed parent Facebook page, sorted from cheapest to most expensive. It’s just basic stuff: $2 packs of pencils, $8 sets of kid’s watercolors, $15 jugs of hand soap that the district stopped supplying three years ago. Last semester, 90% of the items on every teacher’s list got claimed in two weeks, just from parents picking up an extra thing when they do their regular online shopping. No pressure, no minimum spend, if you can’t contribute anything no one asks questions.
The district cut full-time art, music, and all after-school sports two years ago, but we found out they still allow parent volunteers to teach 30-minute weekly enrichment blocks for a month at a time, as long as you pass a basic background check that costs $12. I work part-time at a local garden center, so I teach a 4-week container gardening class for 4th graders. We use empty milk jugs saved from the cafeteria as planters, and I get discounted leftover seeds at the end of every season for next to nothing. A local mechanic teaches basic bike maintenance for 5th graders, and a graphic designer from the college comes in once a month to teach cartooning. It’s not a full-time art teacher, but it gives kids something they wouldn’t get otherwise, and it doesn’t cost the district anything.
We also started a small voluntary teacher supply fund. It’s just a Google form where parents can Venmo whatever they want – $1 a month, $20 once a semester, nothing at all. At the start of each semester, we give every teacher a $200 to $300 prepaid debit card, no strings attached. They can buy classroom supplies, coats for kids who come to school in weather gear with holes, or even coffee for themselves if they want. Last year, the average teacher at our school spent almost $500 of their own money on classroom stuff, so this just takes a little of that weight off.
Last week, Milo came home with a crumpled watercolor painting of our golden retriever, all wobbly edges and bright, blended blue and purple. He told me he got to use a whole new set of watercolors from the wish list, and it was the first time he didn’t have to share a brush with three other kids. It’s taped to our fridge right now.
That’s the small win, but I know we’re just patching gaps. We still don’t have a full-time nurse – she’s only here two days a week, and if your kid gets sick on an off day, they sit on a couch in the hallway until someone can pick them up. The playground still has more potholes than grass, so we couldn’t have 5th grade soccer this fall. The boiler is 40 years old, and the district says they’ll replace it in three years if the construction bond passes. If it doesn’t, we’ll be back to teachers bringing space heaters from home again, breaking fire code to keep the kids warm.
No one ever set out to have to do this. It’s not fair that parents and teachers have to beg for basic supplies when we already pay property taxes. But this is what average underfunded looks like in America right now. It’s not a big crisis that gets solved in a 90-minute documentary. It’s taping a desk leg back together with duct tape, sharing a wish list on Facebook, and growing tomatoes in milk jugs. It’s not perfect, and it’s not enough. But it’s what we do, to get through another year.
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