I'm a public school teacher and I've spent about fourteen thousand dollars of my own money on my classroom over eleven years, and I'm writing this because I finally stopped.

Fourth grade. Eleven years. I'm thirty-seven. I make fifty-eight thousand.

The number isn't an estimate. I kept the receipts, originally for taxes — you can deduct a little of it, a few hundred, which is its own joke — and then I kept keeping them, in a shoebox, which I now understand was not an accounting decision. It was evidence I was collecting for a trial that was never going to happen.

What's in the fourteen thousand, because people picture crayons: crayons, yes. But also tissues, every year, forty boxes a year, because the school provides none and twenty-four nine-year-olds have noses. Headphones, because the state testing is on computers and the district supplied eight for thirty.

Snacks — this is the big one, probably four thousand of it over eleven years, granola bars in my bottom drawer, because I have had a child tell me he was dizzy at ten in the morning in every single one of those eleven years. A rug. Two lamps, because the overhead fluorescents are hard for a kid I had in 2018 who had migraines.

Books, constantly.

I was proud of this. That's the thing I need to get down. For about eight years I was proud of the shoebox. It was the proof that I was the kind of teacher who did whatever it took, and when other teachers complained I thought, quietly, that I was better than them.

What changed: in February my own daughter needed glasses and we put it on a credit card.

That's it. That's the whole conversion. Not a principle. A card.

I sat in the car outside the optometrist and did the math I'd avoided for eleven years: about thirteen hundred a year, average, which is roughly my daughter's entire activity budget. I have been quietly taxing my own child to subsidize a district with a two hundred million dollar budget, and calling it vocation.

So in March I stopped. I buy nothing. I have a sign-up sheet for tissues that parents can contribute to if they want, which three of them do. The snacks are the one I couldn't hold — I still buy granola bars, and I'm not going to pretend I'll stop, because the kid who's dizzy at ten is not an abstraction to me.

And the room is worse. It is visibly worse, and a parent commented in October, lightly, about how bare it looked.

I want to hear from teachers who stopped. Did your administration ever say anything? Did the parents? And the honest one: did you make peace with the room being worse, or did you start again by November? Because I'm seven months in and I almost bought a rug last week.