Aug. 23: Let them eat paste!

‘Member when the most exciting thing on our school supplies list was a binder? We could pick out the cool three-fold ones and then prop them up on our desks like cubicle walls so our classmates couldn’t cheat off our work. That was so awesome, huh?

Having gone to private schools—and I’m not bragging about this; until college my education was little more than religion with just enough math and science thrown in to satisfy the state requirements—I was unaware of the expenses of public education. With the budget cuts in so many school districts, it’s surprising the things that parents are now expected to provide. I’m not complaining; I’m simply saying that things sure are different.

For instance, nowadays—at least in our school district, and in our kids’ grades—supplies are brought to school and thrown together to be shared by the entire classroom. No pencils engraved with names. No artistically personalized glue bottles. No gloating over how one kids’ crayon tips are nice and sharp, while the others are all broken and from a restaurant. We’re also required to send items that were never on my school supplies list, like large boxes of Kleenex, baby wipes, bottles of waterless hand sanitizer, graham crackers, paper plates, wiggle eyes, etc. You get the idea.

The biggest change, though, is that we bring enough supplies in September so that they’ll last the entire school year. This means that instead of sending our kid with a box of crayons and replacing them in a few months, we bring six boxes of crayons on the first day of school. Three bottles of Elmer’s glue. Eighteen glue sticks. Three dozen sharpened #2 pencils. Right now our dining room table looks like a stationery aisle at a grocery store. Actually, it looks like TWO stationery aisles, because we have two kids’ worth of supplies.

The only exciting thing on the school supplies list these days—because it’s the one item we’re allowed to personalize—is a backpack. This year Katie got a sparkly silver Hannah Montana one, and Jack got a 3-D one of The Clone Wars. They will undoubtedly want new ones within a couple months.

I’ve been to six different stores looking for school supplies and many are already out of stock of the more popular items. So that mom running into school late on the first day, screaming “I found them, I found them”? That mom will be me, and I’ll be dragging bags overflowing with 18 glue sticks, Prang colored pencils, Crayola watercolors, a Twin-tip black Sharpie, a black pocket folder, hand sanitizer, graham crackers, and Zip-loc bags that the stores finally re-stocked. Because the rest of you did this shopping months ago, right?

(And that kinda makes me hate you a leetle bit.)