My Wife Is a Teacher. We Can't Keep Spending Money on Her Classroom Like This.

"My wife teaches middle school Spanish, and like most American public school teachers, she spends a lot on stuff for her students and classroom. We don't have much in terms of savings and want to save more. I think that her work-related purchases are an obvious expense to eliminate. At the end of last school year, we talked about it, and she agreed to spend less on work this year. To her credit, she has cut back a lot. But she is still buying tissues (the school only provides teachers with one box at the beginning of the year), extra copy paper (they only get 10 reams per semester), pencils to loan out to students, and teaching resources and materials (the school doesn't provide textbooks or even curriculum for some of her courses). It's been coming out to $125-150 a month so far. (She also made some one-time beginning-of-school-year purchases in August.)"

"She thinks she's done enough and it's unfair for me to expect her to cut back more. Her argument is that if she does, it will make her job significantly more unpleasant and difficult. She says the tissues are a sanitary issue. Without loaner pencils, some students will be unable to do their work, and she gets dinged during observations if everyone isn't engaged. She says the extra paper is needed to copy materials because of the lack of textbooks, iPads, or Chromebooks for her classroom. If she doesn't buy the teaching resources, then she has to spend even more hours after the school day making things from scratch or finding them for free."

A middle school Spanish teacher spends personal funds on classroom necessities while the household tries to save more. Monthly spending reached about $125–150 for tissues, copy paper, pencils, and teaching materials, plus one-time start-of-year purchases. The school supplies are limited—one tissue box and restricted reams—and some courses lack textbooks or curriculum, forcing extra copying and resource creation. The teacher reduced purchases but maintains certain expenses for sanitation, student access, observation performance, and to avoid large time costs creating free materials. The spouse views these costs as employer responsibilities and seeks further reductions.

Read at Slate Magazine