Back to School!

Today is the day where children all over town return to school for another year of learning. Or, as K sees it: torture and indoctrination. Ant is happy to be back in the presence of the most wonderful teacher in the world.

I saw a spot on the Today show a couple days back talking about the annual ‘shopping for the school supplies’. The main thrust of the story: Hurting school districts are having parents buy things like office supplies and toilet paper, bleach and detergent, since their decreased budgets don’t allow them to even provide the necessities.

I have to say, I am on the fence. Parents are hurting, just as schools are hurting. We all want to do the best we can for our children (including buying the school’s toilet paper) but when is enough, enough?

I’ve have experiences on both sides.

In our current school district, they have parents in each grade buy one or two small things to help out the school. You can tell—the items are radically different than usual. This year for Ant I think I bought tape and dry-erase markers. For K, they’ve requested that we purchase our own graphing calculators for the students to use throughout the next five years.

A graphing calculator is not a cost to laugh at, but I like the fact that they were honest about it. Plus, my kid is pretty good at keeping his stuff nice, so I know the $80 investment will serve him well.

In our old school district in St. Louis, we were in one of the richest school districts in the metropolitan area. There was a budget surplus. We had passed building improvement bonds. Still, we were required to purchase many extra things—Ziploc bags, erasers, Clorox, copy paper, post-its for the school, etc. It was insane, and it got under my skin each and every time.

To put it in another light, in St. Louis, we paid some of the highest property taxes imaginable (our broken little house garnered $2000 in property taxes each year), and I still dropped $100 on school supplies, PER CHILD, each year.

Now, if you don’t count the graphing calculator, I spend about $40 per child.

The biggest thing that irked me in St. Louis was the one little line, in all caps, at the top of every year’s school supply list:

PURCHASE ONLY NAME BRAND ITEMS!!!

This is the thing that I just could not follow.

I can buy Crayola crayons and Elmer’s glue on the list when they are on twenty-five cents during tax free weekend. This doesn’t bother me so much. But the idea of buying name brand Ziploc bags and name brand post-it notes…something my child wouldn’t even be using? Well, that just wasn’t going to happen.

They didn’t have the right. Remember the old cliché: Beggars can’t be choosers.

Our new school district says, “Please help us out, because we want to keep all of the teachers working. It’s the best thing for them and for your children.”

Who wouldn’t agree with that?

And yet, I can see why a parent would bristle… especially today—when paying your mortgage and keeping your job and putting food on the table for your kids takes the vast majority of your resources.

I wonder if I am the only one who really feels this way. Have you ever been asked to buy something odd for your child’s back to school? Did you do it? Did you mind?