
This school year, it’s been hard to escape hearing about DonorsChoose, and even harder to escape seeing the Schoology messages about teachers’ projects. But does anyone know what DonorsChoose actually is?
What is DonorsChoose?
DonorsChoose is an online charity designed to help teachers get the materials they need for their classrooms. It was founded by a teacher in the Bronx, who realized the large amount of money he and his colleagues were spending on classroom supplies. Since being founded in 2000, it’s only grown. DonorsChoose has gained popularity with teachers at ERHS, especially since the start of this year when we received significant donations from Google and Selena Gomez through DonorsChoose.
I talked to a few teachers to ask them about their experience using DonorsChoose, including Ms. Stough, Ms. Youngblood, and Mr. Hicks.
Teachers Opinions
Ms. Stough has done quite a few projects with DonorsChoose, from classroom necessities to materials for the clubs she sponsors. This year, a lot of her projects have been mental health oriented. For example, she got snacks and stickers to honor students’ good behavior or excellence on exams. She’s also received t-shirts and vinyl as rewards for members of the origami club. Additionally, DonorsChoose has helped her to get necessary classroom supplies, like headphones or calculators. DonorsChoose has provided her with all the resources that she had previously been spending her own money on. She also told me how much she enjoys the matching offers. DonorsChoose has a feature where foundations can match individual donations for projects to double the funding. Ms. Stough thinks that a “part of it is [that] students are a little happier knowing that people are thinking about them like that,” especially since a lot of donors aren’t even parents, they’re anonymous, or through matching funds.
Ms. Youngblood has also done a lot of projects with DonorsChoose. She started with asking for new cameras for the yearbook because she noticed students were using their phones to take pictures. She’s also done projects for cleaning wipes and tissues, memory cards and card readers, and social emotional themed projects including snacks, plants, and pillows with sayings. One project she did was called ‘Tissues Without Issues’, which people could relate to more after COVID. She also did a project called ‘A Safe Place to Land’, in which she made her room more inviting with plants, pillow covers, Kind bars, and fruit snacks. She emphasized how much money teachers can spend a year on classroom supplies by saying, “It doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s three to five hundred dollars to like, get wipes, to clean all the tables and spend thousands of dollars on supplies a year.” A lot of class necessities like cleaning products, tissues, markers and other writing utensils, whiteboards, and plenty others come out of the teacher’s pocket.
Mr. Hicks has only done one project with DonorsChoose so far, but his experience with it has only encouraged him to do more and more projects because of its ease. He received two new Canon digital cameras for journalism, and described the “constant fight [over] who gets to use the camera.” DonorsChoose helped fix that problem and “untangled the traffic jam.” Mr. Hicks loves the simplicity of the platform, and was surprised by how easy and fun it was. At first, he “thought it was going to be a huge pile of paperwork, but they made it very easy.” He was also surprised by the amount of people who donated to his project that he didn’t know.
DonorsChoose is a great resource for teachers to use to fund all sorts of projects. It’s easy, fast, and effective so that teachers can have all of the materials that their classroom needs.
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