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Last year I donated to my local PBS/liberal radio station to provide a backpack full of school supplies to a child who needed one. It's just about the most worthy cause I can think of, an investment for the future, but it's sad that it's come to this. Wishing you all the best! 
But what tragic circumstances.
Someone, I think Bill Ayers, said that a principal indicator of the state of health of a society is it's investment in education. Not the graduation rate in particular or scores, but investment.
Where teachers are required to pay for supplies (and usually cannot even write them off as business expenses) that were formerly provided by the schools we have a chronic problem, a society that doesn't care and systems that don't work.
How very sad.
What's more important than an investment in our future?? 
Science.
It's worse for me. My state standards prescribe a variety of equipment that kids should be expected to be familiar with and another set of equipment that kids "shall" be familiar with. The old standardized test actually referred to that equipment and assumed that kids were familiar with it--here's an experimental set up and the numbers from it, you get to say what the numbers are and how to interpret them.
Photogates. The cheapest one on our vendor list is $50, and you need two to be useful. I'd need at least 20 for my classroom, assuming none broke or vanished. It also assumes that I have the modules for reading the sensors and recording them and other equipment for mounting them appropriately for actual experiments, instead of saying, "Ooh, look at your photogates." (I don't). I'm looking at $2000 at least just for that one piece of equipment for my classroom, as part of a state requirement. Strictly speaking, I'm in violation of the state teaching standards and have been for years. Since my subject is no longer state tested, nobody really cares because it will affect no reportable test metric or school evaluation metric.
There are perhaps a dozen such bits of tech that I need. I could blow through $25k for just my classroom and still not be properly outfitted to comply with the minimum state standards. Then there are the "should know" pieces of lab equipment. 
There are 3 other teachers. Even if we shared equipment, it would be hard to do without at least two sets of everything.
Our equipment budget is under $1000 for the year that's ending. "Equipment" includes, as it turns out, a photocopy paper surcharge.
Response to demtenjeep (Original post)