Hi Jolene, and welcome to the forum from a fellow (retired) shop teacher. As for the wheel and hammer frames, did any of your former employers work with appropriate sized structural tubing? If not, HeatnBeat is right, you can build them yourself and come in under $500. I am building a wheel at home and I have $55 in my 29" throat wheel frame, including legs and 4" tubing for the upper adjuster. Using Kerry's guidance:
http://allmetalshaping.com/forumdisplay.php?f=29
My frame is 4 X 7 x .310 (5/16) wall rectangular tube and calculates to a stiffness rating of 21. I got the material at a local scrapyard at the going rate to go back out with steel, .20-.25 a pound last summer.
For the adjusting mechanism, I bought 1" fine-thread rod, hex nuts, and thrust bearings from
http://www.use-enco.com/CGI/INSRHM. Around $20 total. I purchased a lot of tooling and material from them for the schools I taught in, their catalog clearly states brand names and/or country of origin for most products, if it's import thay will indicate so.
The upper and lower anvils are going to be the the harder items to source inexpensively. Do you have access to a machine shop at your school or a neighboring tech school? If not, my suggestion is to start with a stout frame, go with cheap wheels at first if you have to, and then upgrade later. We had a bench top Metal Ace wheel at the school I taught at. The anvils were good, but the frame was noodley. In retrospect, I would have put the effort into a stouter frame had I known what I later learned.
plenty of info on making your own anvils, here's a start:
http://allmetalshaping.com/showthread.php?t=694
I certainly don't mean to presuppose to tell you how to do your job, but at my first teaching position, we had next to nothing for a materials budget, but we were in an industrial area. I established arrangements with several local job shops where I could pick up materials in my truck from their scrap bins to use for our welding/metals program. When the students were done I brought our scrap back to them on the next run to pick up more, so they got most of it back. Finally I found a larger manufacturer who didn't want it back, they wrote it off as a donation. He gave us 4-6000 pounds at a time, he just put his drops into pallet boxes right on the shop floor for us. I sent a roll-off tow truck to get it, driver was also an ex-student so we got a break there, too.
If your department has an advisory committee, that might be a place to start to look for donations. I also used Thomas Regional directory to find job shops local to me, used to be paper, now digital:
http://www.thomasnet.com/
Hope this helps some.