Teachers, nothing of yours has been touched. Your lists, your donor history, and every dollar already raised are intact and waiting exactly where you left them.
In the meantime, classroom supply requests should be routed through your district's approved channel. There is one approved channel. It is Amazon. We are told this arrangement is for everyone's convenience, and we are sure that is true for someone.
These are technology decisions, and districts make them at the speed committees make technology decisions, by people who still describe the internet as a place you go.
for someone.What this site does
Three steps, and only one of them is yours.
01 / You
Write the list
In your words, not grant words. "A rug, because the tile is freezing and we read on the floor." People give to the rug. Nobody gives to classroom enrichment materials.
02 / One text
Send it to your people
You get one link. Text it, drop it in a group chat, post it once and let it sit. If the wording is the hard part, we draft it for you and you make it sound like you.
03 / Them
They cross things off
Everyone sees what is covered and what is left, so nobody buys the fourth box of glue sticks. You get a note every time something is claimed, with the name of who claimed it.
That is the entire product: no app to install, no server to maintain, no data center, nothing anyone has to remember to switch off in June. We mention this only because it has come up.
What it could do here
It is a list. It has always been a list.
If the concern is cost, contracts, or control, here is the whole of it, laid out slowly.
- It costs a district nothing. No budget line, no purchase order, no vendor agreement, no software to approve. Nothing existed to approve, which we have slowly come to suspect was the actual problem.
- The money never touches a district. It goes to the teacher's own account, so nobody has a fund to administer, and nobody has a fund to misplace.
- It is not a store. A list can point at the approved vendor for every single item on it and nothing whatsoever changes. We understand this makes the ban harder to explain. We did not write the ban.
- It shows what classrooms actually lack, in teachers' own words, in one place, which is a report nobody currently has and nobody was charged for.
Room 12, what we need
- 24 glue stickscovered
- Headphones that actually workcovered
- A rug, so we can sit on the floorcovered
- Books where my kids see themselves$120
- Snacks for the ones who come hungry$40
- Dry erase markers, the good ones$22
An example list, in the shape teachers actually wrote them. The ask is always this small.
The part that actually stings
Nobody ever told us what compliance would have looked like.
We never asked to be an exception to the policy, only to be told what the policy required, and those two questions got very different receptions. One of them has still not been answered.
We would have changed whatever needed changing: restricted it to approved vendors, put an administrator on every account, handed over the code, printed a name and a phone number at the bottom of every page, moved the whole thing onto whatever server you would prefer it lived on. Nobody asked us for any of it, because the conversation never got that far. Somebody read the policy out loud, and that was the end of it.
We were not asking for an exception. We were asking for ten minutes.
If this reads as though it is about one district, it is not written that way. The policy that switched this off is close to boilerplate. Versions of it are sitting in districts that have never heard of one another, copied between them years apart, each one waiting patiently for the next thing it was not written for.
Policies are not supposed to be the end of it. They are written by people, for a particular moment, out of what was understood at the time. When the moment changes, somebody is supposed to look again. In practice that is nobody's job on any org chart we have ever seen, which is how a rule outlives the understanding that produced it and carries on issuing verdicts anyway. Review exists so that somebody looks again. That half of the job is the part that protects teachers, and it is the half that gets skipped.
So a free tool that put supplies into classrooms at no cost to anyone was switched off by a document older than the problem it was used to solve, by people who were never required to understand it first. Teachers are the ones who pay for that, at the register, in September, the way they always have.
we would have said yes.The offer to meet the standard stands, and it stood the entire time.
Questions nobody asked us
The answers were available the whole time.
- Is it an app?
- No. It is a webpage. You are on one right now.
- Where does it live? Is it on the cloud?
- Yes. So is the email that question was asked in.
- Who maintains the server?
- There is no server. Nothing to patch, nothing to license, nothing for anyone to renew in August.
- Does it collect student data?
- It never has. It collects glue sticks.
- What does it cost a district?
- Nothing. That answer has not changed, and it will not change if the question is asked a fourth time.
- Can we see it on paper?
- You can print this page. We would rather you did not, because the whole point was to stop teachers paying for things out of pocket.
If you want it back
The people to tell are not us.
Tell them plainly, because we genuinely do not think anyone set out to take supplies away from classrooms. We think a website turned up, nobody recognized it, and the safest thing a person can do with something they do not recognize is switch it off and call that diligence. The instinct is understandable, and it is also how a reading corner goes unfunded.
That part is fixable, and it is far more fixable by teachers and parents than by us. If your classroom was better off with this, say so out loud, to someone with a desk at your district office, and put it in writing as well, since both work and only one of them tends to get read twice.
You do not have to argue the policy. Ask them to look at it once, properly, with somebody in the room who can answer a question about it. That is the whole of what we wanted, and it is still available.
We will be back in some fashion.