What Schools Actually Spend on Supplemental Curriculum

Before deciding whether a site license is a reasonable addition to your budget, it helps to know what you're actually comparing it against. Here's how to think about your school's current supplemental curriculum spending, and where a flat-rate license changes that picture.

What "Supplemental Curriculum" Spending Usually Includes

Supplemental curriculum spending generally covers materials that sit alongside a school's core curriculum rather than replacing it: worksheets and practice pages, intervention materials, enrichment resources, and any subscription-based tool teachers use to fill gaps the core program doesn't cover. It's distinct from the core curriculum adoption itself, which is usually a separate, larger, and less frequent budget decision.

Common Spending Patterns: Per-Teacher Reimbursements vs. School-Wide Purchases

Two patterns show up most often in how schools actually pay for supplemental resources:

• Per-teacher reimbursement, where individual teachers pay out of pocket or expense small purchases through a classroom supply budget, resulting in uneven access since it depends on who bothers to ask
• School-wide purchases, where the school buys a resource once for the whole staff, which is less common for smaller costs but becomes the more efficient option as the number of teachers using the same resource grows

The per-teacher pattern is often what happens by default, simply because no one has formally decided to consolidate the cost, not because it's actually the cheaper option once you add up what multiple teachers are spending individually.

Where a Flat-Rate License Changes the Spending Picture

Once enough individual teachers are already paying for something similar, a flat-rate license frequently costs less in total than the sum of what they'd otherwise spend separately, while also giving every staff member access instead of just the ones who took the initiative to buy in. A School Site License is priced flat by school size, from $79/yr for a single teacher up to $1,999/yr for a Large School of 31-75 teachers, with a custom quote for districts above that. Comparing that flat number against what your staff is already spending individually is often the clearest way to see whether consolidating makes sense.

How to Benchmark Your Own School's Spending

Rather than relying on an industry-wide average (which varies too much by school size, region, and grade band to be a reliable benchmark on its own), the more useful exercise is tallying your own school's actual current spending: ask teachers what they've expensed or paid for individually over the last year, add it up, and compare that real number against a flat-rate alternative.

A Hypothetical Illustration of Per-Teacher Spending Adding Up

Here's a hypothetical, meant only to illustrate the math, not a claim about what any real school spends. Imagine a 20-teacher elementary school where roughly half the staff independently pay for some kind of worksheet or practice-resource subscription over the course of a year, each at a modest individual rate. Add up ten teachers each covering their own subscription, and the total may already land in a similar range to a single Medium School site license covering all 20 teachers, including the ten who weren't independently paying for anything.

The comparison isn't about proving the flat-rate option is always cheaper. Sometimes it isn't, particularly at a very small school where only one or two teachers were buying anything to begin with. The exercise is about actually running the numbers for your specific building rather than assuming either direction by default. A school that's never tallied what individual teachers already spend has no real basis for deciding whether consolidating makes financial sense.

Questions to Ask Before You Consolidate Individual Spending Into One License

Before moving from a per-teacher spending pattern to a single school-wide purchase, it's worth working through a short set of questions with your business office:

• How many teachers are currently expensing or personally paying for something in this category, and how much does that add up to across a full year?
• Does the current per-teacher pattern leave some staff with access and others without, simply based on who took the initiative to ask?
• Would a single line-item purchase be easier or harder to get approved than several smaller reimbursements spread across the year?
• If you consolidate, does every teacher actually get access, or does the new purchase still need to be manually distributed to staff?

That last question matters more than it sounds. A flat-rate purchase only delivers on its promise of equal access if every teacher who should have it actually gets a login or account set up, not just the ones who were already asking for something similar before the switch.

---

Curious what a flat-rate license would cost compared to your school's current spending? Get Started to see pricing by school size, or request a quote for a district-level estimate.