‘So instead of $30, I’m spending $150 for paper towels’: Science teacher uses school funds to buy price-gouged supplies to make admin think twice about giving teachers purchasing autonomy

If admin wants their teachers to buy exclusively from the education catalog, they had better prepare for some price-gouged, district-approved supplies. 

Teachers are down in the trenches every day with their students, getting their hands dirty and cleaning up the messes of 25-40 unruly kids. This is most true for science teachers, who love the idea of a baking soda volcano until the day comes when their classroom smells like vinegar, kids are screaming, and there's food dye sludge all over the lab desks. Oh, the joys of teaching young minds!

Via u/DhanushkaSG

No matter how you slice up a science teacher's educational budget for the school year, you're going to come away with a lot of cleaning supply expenses. This seemed self-explanatory to the experienced science teacher in this next story, and after decades of teaching messy little kids how to make planet dioramas and colorful chemical reactions, they knew that a healthy supply of paper towels was a necessity. Being the frugal teacher that they were, they scoured the internet and local grocery stores for the lowest price, keeping costs down for the pencil-pushers over in admin, but when the bean-counters discovered that teachers were making purchases outside of their district-approved, corpo-coded catalog, they insisted that they place their orders according to code. 

Okay, a roll of paper towels costs $1 on Amazon, but through the catalog, it's $15. Of course, the price and the value of the item don't change the demand, so teachers continued to blow through their supply of clean-up materials. Before the semester was over, the admin's wallet was hurting so badly that it made them start considering that the teachers were actually right this time. 

Sometimes, abiding by the book can get you in a financial bind, especially when it disregards the frugal logic of buying from the cheapest seller… Even if that seller is technically out-of-bounds.