Parents at many schools in Limestone County won’t have to pay for school supplies this year.

The school system is covering all school supplies for Title I schools. Schools that qualify for Title I funding have a large percentage of low-income students as determined by the number of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch.

Principal Candy Jones leads the school with the highest rate of poverty in the district, Tanner Elementary School. She says parents are excited when they realize they don’t have to spend hundreds of dollars on school supplies because many of them live on a fixed income and have multiple children.

“It really helps out so they can focus on what they need for home, not what they need for school,” Jones explained. “Everybody’s got the same amount of stuff. Everybody’s got the same supplies. In other cases, some kids will have this and some will have some shiny new stuff, but this way, everybody’s on the same playing field.”

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Limestone County Superintendent Dr. Randy Shearouse said they had some Title I funding left over from last year. They usually partially cover Title I schools’ supplies, but they were able to fully cover supplies for all Title I schools for the 2025-2026 school year.

“You always budget for when some unforeseen things happen,” Dr. Shearhouse said. “Sometimes you don’t spend as much, or maybe you were using it for a teaching position, and you didn’t find that position soon enough. So you just have little things that happen once in a while where you just don’t cover, you just don’t spend all the money that you have budgeted.”

His team spent approximately $214,000 to buy school supplies, like notebooks, headphones and more. Title I funding can go to other programs like professional development and upgrading technology but school leaders wanted to invest in families that are facing economic hardships.

“This directly impacts our students,” Dr. Shearouse said. “We have one school, for example, that has a poverty rate of 88% and that’s a lot of folks that don’t have to think about having to go buy supplies. But of course, with inflation in the last several years, school supplies have gone up, and we just felt as a way to take the burden off those families.”

It will help students at schools like Tanner Elementary School, which has an 88% poverty rate. The lowest poverty rate for a Title I school in Limestone County is 58%.

The program doesn’t cover personal items like backpacks and lunch boxes, however, Jones helped organize a backpack giveaway for her students. Brand new backpacks were donated by several local organizations and churches for the students. They gave away approximately 250 backpacks. Jones said they have more to give to the students whose families couldn’t make it to the event.

Jones knows that a little can go a long way.

“I was raised by a single-parent mom,”Jones said. “I know what it means to be poor, and I don’t want any kid to do without. My mom always made sure I had everything I needed, but she worked really, really hard to make that happen.”

Dr. Shearouse said his team was able to order the school supplies earlier this year. They’re already at schools ahead of the school system’s open house on July 27 and the first day on July 31.