Yahoo Finance A former teacher who spent at least $4,000 on her students details what she bought and why educators 'feel a lot of pressure to spend their own money'
Amelie Krikorian, a former teacher, spent at least $4,000 on her students and classroom in 2022.
She bought items for projects and to make the classroom more welcoming and cheerful.
She thinks there's pressure for teachers to spend money out of pocket.
In 2022, Amelie Krikorian bought books, rugs, chocolate, paint, flashcards, beads, and more for her students and classroom with her own money.
She spent at least $4,000 on her fifth-grade students and classroom, based on documentation shared with Business Insider. Krikorian is just one of many teachers who feel the need to dip into their own wallets.
"Teachers who want to make elementary school a positive and enriching experience do feel pressure to spend their own money," she told BI.
Krikorian, who has since left the education field, said teachers shouldn't have to spend their own money on their classrooms. But results from the National Teacher and Principal Survey indicated that about 94% of teachers spent "their own money on classroom supplies without reimbursement during the 2019–20 school year." Teachers who used their own money spent an average of $459.
Krikorian said there are "a lot of expectations that the kids are going to be able to take home projects and things that they could share with their parents in elementary school." And when schools don't supply all the materials, teachers often step up.
Krikorian resigned from teaching in 2023 following what she described as a particularly difficult incident with a student, but long hours and constant demands also played a role. "I would get to school at 8 o'clock in the morning," Krikorian said. "I would often not leave until 6, and I would have two hours more of work to do after dinner. I never had a weekend free. I never felt like I could go and do anything or visit anybody."
She said spending money out of pocket as a teacher also played a role in her leaving the profession. "For one thing, I was discouraged at having to spend about 10% of my take home pay to be able to do my job properly," she said in a follow-up email. "For another, teachers who would not spend their own money would borrow my materials and often not return them or return them damaged."
For enrichment purposes over the years, Krikorian "bought books that enabled the kids to do additional reading about what we were doing in history and science," she said.
Krikorian thinks that schools and districts could do more to support teachers. "There should be a budget for each classroom," Krikorian said, adding that if the people who create the school budgets could give at least a few hundred dollars a year, "you can gradually build up your stock of library books and other things."
Krikorian said she bought wall decals and other decorations during her teaching career to make the room more welcoming and cheerful. Classrooms can be a "cement, concrete, brick box, and it's painted a really ugly color, and you want to brighten it up," she said.
"You get banners that say, 'Welcome to my classroom,' and you buy a happy birthday chart and put the kids' names on it, and you choose one of the chalkboards in your room and put student work above it so that the students can hang up the things they're proud of, and it all adds up," Krikorian said.
She said she bought materials for crafts and items like beads for necklaces when the students were learning about ancient Egypt.
"I bought papyrus so they were able to make bookmarks with their Egyptian characters on it," she added.
Even though she tended to buy secondhand books for the classroom, it still added up. Krikorian said the classroom library is particularly important, and she suggested that teachers who want to fill a library buy secondhand books from eBay, Amazon, and yard sales.
"I bought a lot through Amazon," she said. "I looked for things that were discounted and on sale at Walmart and Target and just made do wherever I could."
Krikorian said that without her husband's income, she wouldn't have been able to spend as much on her classroom. "If we had been needing my income to live, if we had been needing it for budgetary purposes, I would not have been able to spend that much," she said.
How much money do you have to spend out of pocket at your job? Reach out to this reporter to share at mhoff@businessinsider.com.
Read the original article on Business Insider
