ArcaMax

In the pantheon of parental duties, shopping for school supplies stands alone. At the tripart crossroads of "least enjoyable," "most expensive" and "least negotiable," it is an intrinsic part of life in late summer, and it has been since I was a kid in the Cretaceous era.

I remember it much more fondly from that perspective -- being the receiver of shiny No. 2 pencils, folders, composition notebooks and a Trapper Keeper to hold it all together. I'm certain my parents found the experience annoying and expensive, but with all due respect, they had absolutely no clue.

When my son was in preschool, I was alarmed to find myself the recipient of a school supply list -- one that requested separate packs of "thin" and "thick" markers of a particular brand in a particular color palette.

Why, I wondered at the time, would preschoolers need both thick and thin markers? Would their art instruction be so differentiated that some of the projects could be ruined by an overly wide colored line?

But that wasn't all that was on the list. There were both glue sticks and gloppy white glue, construction paper, regular white paper and crayons galore (No, not just any kind of crayon, silly! Certain kinds of crayons, certain brands, with certain numbers of crayons in the box).

In addition to the art supplies -- expected, maybe, though bizarrely specific for 4-year-olds -- there were the sundries.

There were paper towels and massive amounts of tissues, disinfectant wipes and hand sanitizer.

Excellent, I thought. They're going to teach him to clean the classroom, like a tiny little scullery maid!

There was, I seem to remember, toilet paper on the list as well, though it's possible that I blacked out halfway through reading it all.

After seeing everything on the supply list, I double-checked to make sure that I was paying for my son to attend this preschool instead of the other way around, as the length of the list seemed to indicate, and, yep, as I suspected, they were indeed extorting cleaning supplies in addition to the thousands of dollars we were already forking over voluntarily.

But there's no point in arguing about school supplies. It's like arguing about a tip jar. No matter how justified the complaint, the very act makes you feel mean and petty. What kind of monster could begrudge a preschool some crayons?

So I went to my neighborhood big-box store one fine Saturday afternoon, armed with the list and ready to pile up my cart, only to find that apparently all parents but me had concluded their school supply shopping sometime in early June.

The back-to-school section looked like the rubble in an abandoned warehouse, with broken pencil toppers and half-opened packages of markers littering the shelves. Gear with the most popular characters was sold out, and kids who wanted Spider-Man and Taylor Swift pencil cases would have to make do with Droopy Dog and Peppermint Patty.

The sole remaining packages of crayons were all "Colors of the World" boxes, which held an array of 24 flesh-colored tones, useful perhaps for coloring in police sketches but otherwise mostly performative in nature. I have yet to see a toddler draw a person entirely in shades of beige and brown, without so much as a dot of a more exciting color. Why the store had stocked its shelves to the rafters with flesh crayons remains a mystery unsolved to this day.

There were, needless to say, no specific 10 packs of the shades and brand of markers demanded by my son's school supply list, let alone ones of differing thickness.

Dejected, I went home and did exactly what I had been hoping to avoid, which was to spend $400 online. The supplies there were all in bulk, which is how I wound up with 10 extra bottles of Elmer's glue so that I could get two for the preschool.

These days, I buy my kids' school supplies via a service that selects, packages and delivers all their supplies to the school. They get a list from the teachers and put exactly what's required in each box. I don't even have to see a list anymore. My participation in the process begins and ends when I type my credit card number into the service's website.

"How much does that cost?" one parent asked me when she heard about it.

I simply shrugged my shoulders.

"I have no idea," I admitted. "But whatever it is, it's not enough."

COPYRIGHT 2026 GEORGIA GARVEY

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Copyright 2026 Creators Syndicate Inc.