Check CU has acquired a complete record of Amazon.com purchases by the Champaign, Illinois Unit 4 School District, dating back to 2011.
The records span from August 1st, 2011, to January 24th, 2024, and include 72,738 line items which were processed by 146 different individuals. The purchases total $4,869,258.47 in that time period, and sustaining a similar rate, that number will have easily surpassed $5 million at the time of publishing this article.
The District spent just $8,359.20 on Amazon purchases in 2011, but that number grew steadily to $436,908.61 in 2020. Then the spending exploded, nearly doubling in 2021 to $851,009.32 and staying near that level ever since. Last year, in 2023, the District spent $873,342.39 on Amazon purchases.
When the District began using Amazon in 2011, many of the purchases were books. Also notable beginning in 2011 were sizeable purchases of gift cards – just a couple months after making their first purchases ever on Amazon, the District made five purchases of Amazon gift cards for between $400 and $920 each.
We aggregated up some of the purchase categories for the 2011 to January 2024 period:
- $77,634.77 in items marked “apparel”
- $76,477.65 in arts and crafts items
- $11,725.48 in automotive items
- $19,946.93 in beauty supplies, including makeup
- $801,962.14 in books
- $97,315.67 in furniture
- $8,805.84 in video games and gaming consoles
- $18,522.76 electronic gift cards and $18,894.41 regular gift cards including a number of $500 and $1,000 Amazon gift cards
- $337,292.52 in toys
- $825,205.97 in office products
- $46,497.68 in grocery items
Some of the larger purchases include:
- $16,974.51 for 999 laptap chargers on 8/10/2020
- $15,838.20 for 130 Canon T6 DSLR cameras on 6/14/2019
- $7,291.45 for 132 no-touch forehead thermometers on 6/20/2020, and another 120 units on 7/10/2020 for $5,998.80
- $4,370.00 for 2 dual sided ID card printers on 5/21/2021
- $4,766.66 for 145 copies of the book “These Kids Are Out of Control”: Why We Must Reimagine “Classroom Management” for Equity
The School District provided Check CU with a CSV file in response to our FOIA request, which we have converted to an XLSX file and made available here. The file is somewhat large, being tens of thousands of lines in length. Please leave a comment or send us an email if you find anything interesting.