My son and I ran over to a super convenience store (you’ll know which one) to do some last-minute grocery shopping when we happened upon some notebooks in multiple colors, each of them college-ruled, 70-paged, and spiraled. The next row on the shelf featured rulers, erasers, pens, and other accessories that go under the “we may need this in school” bucket. The third row showcased pencil cases, sharpeners, and disinfectant wipes.

After taking inventory of the back-to-school displays, and noting how my diligent wife and I took care of the majority of supplies a few weeks ago, I had a freak out and called my wife to ask her if there was anything we needed for the first day of school. She said she needed 100-sheet notebooks, but the notebooks on display only made it to 70 pages. A 30-page difference wasn’t good enough for me. Knowing that this popular convenience store is notorious for triggering hoarders, my son and I searched through the columns anyway. After coming up empty, I observed the super-long lines of parents and community members with carts full of supplies, some of them angrily waving printed checklists.

I dropped my basket of light groceries in front of the store and said, “Why do we need all these things again?”

As an educator and parent, I’ve taken a good survey of school supply lists across multiple schools. Some of them read like wishlists while others read like mandates. For parents/guardians/community members, school supply lists feel like giant scrolls that feel more like a cumbersome backdoor school tax on students and families. Yes, it’s bad enough that public schools across the nation are consistently under threat of massive budget cuts (I mean, pick any source). We’re also seeing societal strife play out at the school level, including (but not exclusive to): homelessness, COVID-19, asylum seekers, poverty, and dis- and misinformation plaguing our sources of knowledge.

But if there’s an issue that seems to bring some of this home, it’s school supply lists. If we did school well, none of them would be necessary.

In a better world, schools would have notebooks, sharpeners (the good kind), and calculators for every student and many to spare. There’d be no concerns for binders, loose leaf sheets, or erasers, either, as administrators would have received their boxes by midsummer. Classrooms would have disinfectant wipe dispensers installed, the bathrooms would be functional all year, and the water fountains would have clean drinking water. Art classrooms and physical education classrooms wouldn’t be dependent on parent associations to get supplies that were necessary for their curricula.

American aversion to taxes on the wealthy keeps the rest of us further away from a truly shared vision for public schooling, and the longer the school supply list, the more obvious this becomes.

When I was a classroom teacher, I rarely paid attention to when my school would generate these lists. Students would come to my classroom with a handful of school supplies they were supposed to turn over to me, and I’d look at them awkwardly like, “Umm, thanks? I’ll save it for when you need it?” For the school year, I only needed a notebook, a stack of looseleaf, a pencil, and, hopefully, their attention. Every year as a teacher, the weeks before the first day of school were dedicated to covering the basics for my students since I felt my students shouldn’t be left behind for any reason on Day 1. Perhaps paradoxically, I also didn’t need to push that safety net on individual parents and community members.

So, here we are. While politicians refuse to create equitable conditions for students and prefer to blame the most vulnerable of them, school-based personnel are left with all the problems society places upon them. As I’ve stated a billion ways, we should be investing more in our schools since we have less students. Doing less with less is bad math when we could be doing more with more. Leaving the “more” part up to individual or small collectivities as opposed to societal investments perpetuates inequity for everyone.

But, as the school year starts, I’m reminded that every generation of students has its set of challenges and maybe abolishing school supply lists feels tertiary in a list of things we need to fix. But it’s always those little things we forget that seem to get to us right when we need it.

Jose