Thanks again – and I'm beyond thrilled to see that my tongue-almost-in-cheek suggestion of "Now that we hit $210K, we're upping the ante to $300K, RIGHT?" turned out not to be so tongue-in-cheek after all. !!!

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How is "Urgency" determined?
The Urgency ranking looks for projects which:
- Come from high poverty schools;
- Will help teachers who've never been funded before;
- Have been partially funded by several donors; and
- Don't have much time left.

It's tough to match all these criteria, but our Urgency ranking finds projects meeting as many of those criteria as possible. The ranking is automated and updated thoughout each day.

The entire donation list for them is Bet Red. Impact, indeed.

Second Mr. E and his Documentary project needs about 5 more donors to secure a place on the 1st page of the popularity sort. Even the smallest donation gets counted as a donor and bumps the balance. Lets get him some more help. http://www.donorschoose.org/donors/proposal.html?id=279669&challengeid=23248

And finally there is only one more projects set to expire in November. A project for "My Bloody Life: The Making of a Latin King" by Rey Sanchez. and it only needs $243 http://www.donorschoose.org/donors/proposal.html?id=288343&challengeid=23248

So again happy halloween from Europe! Let's have a great last day. Thank you to everyone, especially Sarah, for making this October an incredible one. So glad I stumbled across Bet Red! It has made my month.

The spreadsheet has the completed projects moved to a separate section — on the top towards the right there's a link marked "Completed!"

As for the desks, well, I sat in chair-desks all through junior high and high school, and I managed to get educated. It's not like their existing furniture was destroyed in a fire or flood, as is the case with some other classrooms vying for the same donor dollars. And $7,500 is a lot of money. And that teacher has already had 26 projects funded. And his school is not tagged as being high- or even moderate-poverty. I'm not saying it's not a worthy project — they're all worthy projects — but there are geography teachers who don't have wall maps, and English teachers who don't have enough copies of any one book for the whole class to read at the same time, and it just comes down to subjective priorities.

There are projects on the list that some people here are gung ho about but I don't particularly support (and which fall into the "laptops or A/V equipment or digital cameras" category), but that's okay because I don't have to.

The BR/DC page includes both funded AND unfunded projects, where the spreadsheet lists all the (500+) funded projects on the Completed! page and those still needing funding on the State/Poverty Level/Project Name/Category/Expiration Date/Grade Level sheets. (All 160-odd projects still needing funding are on each of those six pages, they're just in a different order on each page.) Total, the projects on the Completed! sheet plus the incomplete projects sorted on each of the other six sheets equals 670.

Jenno:

At this point, I plan to leave up the spreadsheet indefinitely. It will probably be updated slightly less often through November – a few times a week rather than once or twice a day. Towards the end of the month, barring catastrophe, I'll update the FAQ and leave the spreadsheet up as an archival demonstration of what mountains people who care can move when they try.

After the challenge is over, can you keep the spreadsheet going for another month-ish so we can use it as we spend our HP matches and monthly-donation-sign-up giving cards? There are still a lot of good projects that the readership suggested that we could clean up!