Don’t worry. That collective sigh of relief emanating from your neighbor’s home just marks the successful end of a chaotic several weeks focused on buying the right supplies for their children, teenagers, or young adults. What might be a bit more disturbing is the sigh you will hear in October when the bills for those supplies come due.
Recent data indicates that Americans will spend more than $135 billion outfitting their children for school and/or college. That translates to almost $900 a household, or just under $600 for each child returning to grades K-12, and just over $1,300 for each college-bound student. (Full disclosure: these figures also include back-to-school clothes and shoes.)
I spent a few hours reviewing the Sunday advertisements to see what supplies needed for school in 2024. I did recognize a few items among all the products featured—pencils, spiral-bound notebooks, BIC pens, and three-ringed binders. Most other items, electronic and labeled with a string of numbers and letters, were less familiar. Our electronic equipment needs in the 1960s were limited—okay, they were non-existent. To say that the list of essential school supplies has changed over the past two hundred years would be an understatement.
Often our hunt for school supplies centered on the lunch box purchase. Although in the early grades, we did go home for lunch every day, the metal lunch box and matching thermos, which first became popular in the early 1950s, provided a chance to choose your favorite cartoon or movie hero to accompany you each day. Your lunch box character or design was one of the first times our choices made a personal statement about our interests.
As we moved into junior high, we did purchase more supplies—folders for every subject, our own lined paper, Big Chief or Mead notebooks, three-ring binders, plastic protractors, pink erasers, plastic pencil cases that now could be clipped into notebooks, and a ruler. A word about those # 2 yellow pencils—their most important use was as an excuse to get up during class and walk to the steel pencil sharpener often located in the back of the room, allowing for the passing of clandestine notes or a chance to check out someone else’s seat work.
I don’t ever remember taking books home in elementary school but beginning in junior high we were issued our own copies of our texts. We were required to cover them, and for most of us that meant cutting up brown paper bags and wrapping the exterior with a blank canvas for the many doodles created out of boredom over the school year. These surfaces also allowed you to put your name and your boyfriend’s name in tiny little hearts, pierced with arrows—which, of course, were scratched out on a regular basis as those early romances changed by the month.
Today, most schools, public, catholic, and private, post an online list of necessary supplies and suggested or acceptable brands to purchase. The list, at least for elementary schools, has not changed all that much over the years—but very few of the supplies are now provided by the school.
