How a nonprofit helps relieve Sonoma County teachers from self-funding their classrooms

It was a still-sleepy morning in Meaghan King’s special education classroom at Herbert Slater Middle School, but in one corner, Seth Smith and his classmates were peering into handheld black boxes and chatting excitedly.

Smith, 13, moved his head back and forth and up and down, seemingly sweeping his gaze across the room. But through the Google Expeditions viewer he held to his eyes, he was actually seeing a shady clearing, filled with lions — a scene captured from thousands of miles away.

For King’s class, the technology has been transportive. With all the complications of field trips, especially now amid a persistent pandemic, the virtual experiences offered through Google goggles let students take trips to anywhere – from the Serengeti to the ocean floor to the Louvre – are far from a shoddy alternative, King said.

"We’ll do a topic like U.S. history,“ she said. ”And ... we’ll read about it all week and then at the end of the week we’ll go on a field trip to where the Constitution is.“

“These just open the door to a lot more (places),” King said.

It’s what she had in mind when she raised $2,637 to purchase the kits in 2019 through DonorsChoose, a nonprofit crowdfunding site that helps school staff secure supplies and materials for their students.

The website, started in 2000, is a vehicle for willing donors, from community members to multimillion-dollar corporations, to support public school educators across the nation, including Santa Rosa. In the past five years, staff across Sonoma County’s largest school district have raised a total of $522,663 to fund 770 projects.

DonorsChoose, as it has grown in popularity over the years, has helped mitigate the pressure on public school staff to fill in the gap between their schools’ budgets and their students’ needs with their own funds, as well as enabled schools to acquire technology and equipment with steep costs.

“In a perfect world, it would be nice if we could come to school knowing we’re having an archery unit and we know that we will not have problems getting that equipment,” said Nikki Kumasaka, a physical education teacher at Herbert Slater Middle School, who also coaches girls soccer at Santa Rosa High School. “Unfortunately, that’s not the world that we live in.”

Kumasaka has previously used DonorsChoose to secure three Bluetooth portable speaker sets for students at her school to use during classes and team workouts.

On a recent Friday, one of her P.E. classes was playing “pedometer games” on the blacktop, which included a “Red Light, Green Light”-style activity in which students ran while the music played from the speaker, and halted when it stopped.

“We want to promote exercise, fun, and sportsmanship,” Kumasaka wrote in her fundraiser. “Enough equipment for all our students would increase participation. Students would have a healthier body and mind.”

In all, it took six donors to fully fund the $838 request, aided by a match from an anonymous donor on Giving Tuesday, which is the first Tuesday to follow Thanksgiving.

One of those donors, though, was Kumasaka herself. When the project was getting close to the due date before expiring, she chipped in the remaining cost so as not to lose the funding she had already collected.

Donations to projects that expire are either returned to the donor, or, if they’re considered a friend or family member of the teacher, they get credited to the educator to use on future projects.

Kumasaka has another project this year: She’s trying to raise $3,783 for new cardio workout equipment for the Herbert Slater campus. She launched the project in early October, and she still needs $499 to be fully funded.

“If I get close to my date, I’m going to put that into it, because it’s a huge project and I’m not going to lose that money,” she said.

It’s long been an open secret that public school teachers pay money out of their own pocket to make sure their classes are equipped with supplies such as paper, writing and art materials or even some furniture.

The Educator Expense Deduction allows qualified educators to file for up to $250 in tax deductions each year. But for some educators, that covers only a small fraction of the personal funds they spend on their own classrooms each year.

King, for example, estimated she spends close to $1,000, “’little by little, here and there.” A 2019 analysis from the Economic Policy Institute estimated the average California teacher spent $664 out of pocket annually.

Laurie Fong, board of trustees president of Santa Rosa City Schools, called the disparity between classroom needs and districts’ budgets “galling,” a sign of the continued need for investment in public schools.

“Why do we have to go hat in hand to fund public education?” she said.

Family and friend networks are often the key to generating buzz around a project, teachers said.

“My mom will share it on her Facebook and that’s the best,” said Sam Kim, a sixth grade teacher at Steele Lane Elementary School. She’s used the website for 18 different projects in her five years as a full-time teacher.

Steele Lane educators have used DonorsChoose to fund significantly more projects than any other school in the district in that time frame. The campus’ $121,902 raised makes up nearly a quarter of all funds raised in Santa Rosa City Schools in the past five years.

Kim noted that Steele Lane has included a link to all DonorsChoose fundraisers for the school on the home page of its website. She also said her principal, Amber Williams, includes information on fundraisers in the school newsletter.

Kim has used the site to get books for her classroom as well as art supplies. During the 2020-2021 school year, when her students were learning from home, she noticed some of them were struggling to wake up in time for school.

So she used DonorsChoose to fund the purchase of several alarm clocks that could be plugged into the USB port on their laptops.

Kim's first fundraiser was in early 2018, raising $634 to cover the cost of several digital cameras, so she could teach a photography elective.

In the wake of the 2017 firestorm, several groups stepped up to fully fund active projects in Northern California schools. An offer from the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation that matched every donation to her fundraiser 10 times over meant that one donation pushed her across the finish line.

She still remembers the feeling.

“I had this overwhelming sense of gratitude (that) someone I’ve never personally met (would) be willing to provide that,” Kim said.

It’s not uncommon for organizations to step in and fund projects in full, especially during times of crisis or if the projects center on a topic relevant to the company or foundation.

Karen Lassen, who worked for three years as a library technician at Santa Rosa Middle School before departing due to health reasons this fall, also described what it meant to see strangers step up to support her requests for books for her students.

“Sometimes they send a (note) saying, ‘I’m very interested in literacy,’ and ‘I used to go the school’ or ‘I live in the area and felt it was a special thing for me to do,’” Lassen said. “And I would write back, saying, ‘Thank you so much. The kids will really enjoy this.’ I think a lot of it is, people want to support reading.”

Santa Rosa Middle School has had six projects funded in the past five years, reaching nearly $2,500 in total. All of those projects were Lassen’s.

Lassen said she thought some people might be intimidated by the process to launch a fundraiser. But DonorsChoose staff and volunteers can help educators craft their descriptions, she said, and advise on how to make the most of each one.

“It’s so easy and I think the reward is fabulous,” she said. “(People) want to help. They have kids, nieces and nephews. Education just impacts people.”

You can reach Staff Writer Kaylee Tornay at 707-521-5250 or kaylee.tornay@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @ka_tornay.