So Many School Supplies

We sell Dabbawalla backpacks!

Yesterday, we talked about back-to-school traditions and touched on the common ground of shopping for clothes and supplies to kick off the academic year. Buying for school has become almost a holiday, with stores freeing up whole aisles to display notebooks, folders, files, lunch boxes, and backpacks just to name a few. It’s all about merchandising for maximum sales, with prepackaged multiples, and lots of loss-leaders to encourage buying, well… lots!

This makes me stew a little especially about two issues:

• How do families, especially single parents with more than one child, afford all these supplies?

• Are all these cheap goods environmentally produced – is the cheap paper from old-growth forests, for example?

Recently, in a discussion about just these issues, Sherry Wachter, a single mom who owns Magic Dog Press, shared this comment:

Just the basic supplies for Patrick ran us almost $200. We could have economized folders, but I went with the zipping ones because it makes paper management easier. But for everything else we pretty much went the economy route. And this year wasn't as bad as other years have been--these days parents are expected to purchase all of the supplies their child will use throughout the year. In the early years they took all the stuff and pooled it and it became the classroom supplies (saved the school the cost of purchasing anything). These days that's what gets schlepped in the backpack. What nobody's talking about is the amount of waste involved in this system--notebook paper that gets wrinkled and marked up, pencils that get stolen or dropped so the leads break, glue sticks and markers that dry out, and so forth. I would say, because of packaging, we usually end up buying about three times what Patrick actually uses, simply because that's how the stuff is sold. And while I can buy glue stick throughout the year the markers and colored pencils are a different issue--once the first few colors run out or the leads break up the entire set has to be replaced, which means a glut of colors like ochre, salmon, and periwinkle, which no one ever uses.

I think the idea to pool the supplies by paying the teacher for supplies is a good one. There are plenty of bulk-buying opportunities and $50 per student would probably cover the cost of basic classroom supplies. It would also take the burden from teachers, who have been known to dip into their own pockets to help children and families in need.

How do things work at your school? Are you required to fill a proscribed list of supplies mandated by your school board (as is the case with my single sister and her two teens) or do you have other options? Do you know of any charities formed to help buy school supplies? What about the ever-increasing size of backpacks for even the youngest children to schlep all those goods? If we get enough comments about that, we’ll probably write a separate post about that particular trend! In the meantime, here are some tips on buying a backpack for you child from Web MD, and the link to Dabbawalla backpacks which Little Pickle Press is pleased to offer for sale here.