How Creative DIY Culture Can Cut School Budgets in Half

My mother always said, “if you want something done yourself, you’re going to have to do it yourself.”  Salient advice from an impressively literal woman.  Our modern “do-it-yourself” culture asks the question, “Why trust professionals, artisans, science, and efficiency when you can just wing it?”

Budgets are tight in the education world, and as we watch our Presidential candidates discuss the future of our education systems, it’s difficult to imagine what the future may hold.  Policies, standards, and funding change yearly, and the modern educator needs to be able to think on their feet and adapt, adapt, adapt.  Fortunately, alongside this sort of financial uncertainty, we have the emergence of an incredible “do-it-yourself” ethos.  Tips, tools, and tricks of every trade are shared daily online to help people from all walks of life take matters into their own hands.  For teachers, this means guaranteeing the best of the best for their students, despite the availability of resources.  Today, Education World explores some DIY possibilities you might not have considered for your classroom!

DIY Computers

Perhaps the biggest trend in EdTech these days is getting one-to-one device-to-student ratios in our schools.  Leasing programs and educational discounts from major computer companies have made this a reality for some.  For others, the classic computer lab supports those 21^st century skills.  However, why wait for a grant when you can do it yourself?  It can’t be that hard, right?  A few wires, some sort of electricity source … Every school has that closet or cabinet filled with broken or obsolete technology supplies.  I don’t know how to build a computer, or how a toaster works for that matter.  But do you know who else didn’t know how to make a computer at first?  Bill Gates.  Steve Jobs.  Time to capitalize on those old remote controls, loose batteries, and DC power cords and see if you can turn them into an iPad.  What a phenomenal performance task it would be to have students figure out how to build themselves a PC out of raw materials!  Armed with nothing more than a few YouTube videos and the will to succeed, even the most mechanically illiterate educator can have their students sharing Google Docs in no time!

DIY Note Paper

Sometimes the most important teacher supplies are the ones that end up on the backburner when it comes to budget season.  More and more schools are monitoring paper usage to try to cut down on potential waste.  Surely, with the increases in technology, many of our classrooms are now nearly paperless.  But for those that still need to rely on this ancient pressed cellulose pulp, it’s often nowhere to be found!  Fret no more!  With this guided tutorial, you can start making your own paper!   Follow these simple instructions and after a few hours or days, you will have yourself a gorgeous hand-crafted artisan piece of paper that could be used for anything from a graph to 1/10^th of an essay.  Your students will love scrawling ink across your beautifully designed product, and you’ll finally have an arts and craft project to fill all that free time you have between grading essays, writing lessons, workshopping potential projects, managing data, researching content, keeping up with best practices, differentiating assignments, running after school activities, remediating content, meeting with parents, and designing a full, robust, and engaging curriculum for the future of humanity.

DIY Desks

When it comes to the more rudimentary types of classroom supplies, ordering and shipping can be a long and tedious process.  Teachers might find themselves with a last-minute additional student to their classroom without a chair or desk for that student to sit in!  Surely, the quick and easy solution would be to have them sit on the floor, or teach the class while you sit on the floor.  But we’re crafty DIY-ers.  The DIY desk is inspired directly from the hit '80s and '90s television show, MacGyver.  The method?  Step 1: Take stock of the materials you have in the classroom at your disposal.  Step 2: Prioritize items into “essential” and “non-essential” classroom supplies.  Step 3:  Categorize the “non-essential” list into separate “can be made into a chair” and “cannot be made into a chair” lists.  Step 4:  Glue, staple, and nail the remaining items together into chair shapes.  It’s simple, it’s elegant, and it gets the job done. 

DIY Textbooks

Textbooks are expensive.  And the truth is, content changes every day, which means lots of re-ordering that can cost a school district a fortune.  Why rely on increasingly obsolete information in published texts when you can easily write your own?  The opportunities here are endless!  You know that one unit you’re never too enthused about teaching?  Skip it!  Have an affinity for a particular era from the past?  Write yourself into the history books!  Who helped the Archbishop of Canterbury draft the Magna Carta?  You did!  Do a chapter on Batman’s origin story and another on that episode of Doctor Who where they go back to help Van Gogh fight off the Krafayis!  If students question the content, you can simply explain that you “literally wrote the book on it.”

DIY Art Program

In order to keep students thinking creatively, art programs are an absolutely essential part of any school district’s curriculum.  And art teachers are the masters of “thinking outside the box” when it comes to gathering art supplies.  When sitting in on next year’s budget meeting, however, consider selling this extremely untapped resource: condiments.  Go to any local fast food restaurant and you will see packets and packets of ketchup, mustard, hot sauce, salsa and relish (for texture), just lying around, and completely free.  Have students explore mandalas with a kaleidoscope of salad dressings.  Master pointillism with very carefully arranged pepper specs.  Create negative space with gobs of mayonnaise.  Oils and acrylics might be traditional media, but neither of them attract ants in quite the same way. 

Written by Keith Lambert, Education World Associate Contributing Editor

Lambert is an English / Language Arts teacher and teacher trainer in Connecticut.

Do you have other exciting DIY projects going on in your classroom?  Share in the comments below!