What An Average Underfunded Public School In America Is Really Like: A Parent’s Story
I stood in the third-grade hallway last September, squinting at a handwritten sign taped to a cinder block door that read “Ms. Henderson, Room 214”. The linoleum by the water fountain was cracked so bad the custodian had stretched a cheap rubber mat over it that curled up at the edges, and three of the 12 ceiling light bulbs were out, leaving half the hall in soft, gray shadow. My 8-year-old son Leo tugged my hand and said, “Ms. Henderson says we can bring extra crayons from home if we have ‘em. The supply closet only has the broken stubs left from last year.”
We moved to this small suburban district two years ago, when my husband got a factory job that paid just enough to get us out of the one-bedroom apartment we’d been renting in the city. We knew the school was lower-funded when we bought our small $180,000 house—property taxes here are 60% lower than they are in the wealthy district 15 minutes down the highway, because most of the town is made up of service workers, factory employees, and retired people on fixed incomes. This isn’t the extreme, high-poverty school you see in documentaries. 58% of kids qualify for free or reduced lunch, but 42% don’t. It’s just average: the kind of underfunded school most American kids attend, that rarely makes the news.
I talked to Ms. Henderson for 10 minutes after back-to-school night that year, leaning against her doorframe while a group of kids raced past us down the hall. She’s 56, has been teaching at this school for 18 years, and she told me she spent $417 out of her own paycheck on classroom supplies last year. That’s not just crayons and construction paper. It’s granola bars for the kids who come to school without breakfast, since the district cut the universal snack program two years ago to pay for patching the leaking gym roof. It’s band-aids for scraped knees, because the nurse’s office only keeps one box a month for the whole school. When she showed me her classroom library, I counted 12 books about dinosaurs that were published before Leo was born, and only three on the shelf that matched the current reading level for his class. The last time the district allocated money for new books was 2019.
I started volunteering once a month after that, just an hour on Friday afternoons. Last month, we did a science unit growing bean seeds, and only half the kids had plastic cups to plant theirs in. We had to pair up, and a few kids shared cups on the windowsill because there wasn’t enough to go around. The district cut the entire K-5 science supply budget three years ago, so every experiment has to be supplied by either the teacher or parent donations. Most parents here can’t afford to drop $20 on cups and dirt for a class project, so it falls to people like me who have a little extra room in our grocery budget.
A lot of people I talk to from the wealthier district nearby ask why we don’t just “do more fundraisers” or get the PTO to pay for supplies. Our PTO has seven active members, all of us work full time, and our biggest fundraiser last year was a cookie dough sale that netted $1,180. That paid for the 8th grade end-of-year field trip to the state park, with nothing left over for new textbooks or working door locks.
What no one talks about when they discuss underfunded schools is that it’s not always a big crisis. It’s a thousand small, daily compromises that add up. Ms. Henderson’s classroom door lock has been broken for six months. The district says they’re replacing broken locks one wing at a time, and our wing is scheduled for next summer. Until then, she propped a heavy wooden chair against the doorknob every time they do a lockdown drill. It works, but it’s not ideal. No one is ignoring the problem; they just don’t have the money to fix everything at once.
I’ve picked up a few small, doable things that help, that any parent or caregiver can do even if you don’t have hundreds of dollars to spare. First, instead of asking your child’s teacher “what do you need?” and leaving it at that, follow up with an offer of something specific. I text Ms. Henderson at the start of each month and say “I have $25 set aside for the class this month—what do you need most?” Sometimes it’s a box of granola bars, sometimes it’s glue sticks, sometimes it’s extra socks for kids who have an accident outside. Teachers hate begging, so taking the guesswork out of it takes a lot of pressure off them.
Second, if you can spare an hour a month, offer to do small, boring tasks that no one else has time for. I spend my volunteer time sharpening all the pencils in the classroom, sorting through the supply bin to throw away dried-up markers and broken crayons, and restocking the class snack bin. That takes 45 minutes, and Ms. Henderson told me that’s more helpful than most donations, because she never has time to do those little tasks between lesson planning, grading, and all the mandatory paperwork the district requires.
Third, show up to one school board meeting a year. You don’t have to give a 10-minute speech. Just get up and say your kid’s name, what classroom they’re in, and one small thing that needs fixing. Our recent small property tax increase for the schools passed by 127 votes. Most of the people who showed up to support it were regular parents, not politicians or activists. Your voice counts for a lot more than you think when almost no one else shows up.
Leo likes his school. He has three best friends he plays soccer with at recess, and Ms. Henderson stays after school once a week to help him with his reading, because he still struggles a little with big words. It’s not perfect. Some days I lie awake worrying that he’s not getting the same opportunities kids get 15 minutes down the road. But most days, we’re just taking it one step at a time. The problem won’t get fixed with one cookie dough sale or one parent sharpening pencils. But it’s something, for now.
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