Q&A of the Day – The Cost of Sending Kids Back to School
Each day I feature a listener question sent by one of these methods.
Email: brianmudd@iheartmedia.com
Social: @brianmuddradio
iHeartRadio: Use the Talkback feature – the microphone button on our station’s page in the iHeart app.
Today’s Entry: Hello Brian, I love your show. You and Joel are awesome. This year my wife and I are struggling financially to prepare our three boys; ages 5, 8 and 13 for the upcoming school year. Our boys go to a public school here in Palm Beach County. Uniforms, shoes and backpacks are necessary for three growing boys. On top of that we’ve got three long lists of school supplies we are required to purchase and bring in at the beginning of the year. We were thinking back to when we went to school our parents only needed to supply us with a binder with paper, pencils, ruler and other basic tools necessary to do our lessons and homework. This is understandable and reasonable.
We were wondering why we as parents, who pay taxes have to supply the school with sanitizer, paper towels, copy paper and other various supplies that the schools should have on hand for their normal operation. As you have pointed out in the past, what the school district takes in is quite considerable. Why are they burdening the parents with providing the schools with these basic supplies instead of working it into their budget?
Bottom Line: With the start of the new school year right around the corner you’re certainly not alone in your concerns regarding the cost of supplies for sending your children back to school. Stepping away from the specific asks of the Palm Beach County School District for a moment... WalletHub’s Annual Back-to-School Shopping Survey found that 79% of parents felt that schools were asking parents to buy too many supplies for the upcoming school year, with 86% saying that the cost of education has gotten out of control. You’re obviously in good company with your concerns. In addressing your question about whether the Palm Beach County School District is asking for parents to pony up for more than is the norm, I’ll going to do a side-by-side comparison with the school supply lists of two other nearby school districts.
You mentioned that you have a 5-, 8-, and 13-year-old. Your 5-year-old is likely heading into kindergarten, I’ll use that as the baseline to compare the asks of the school districts.
The Palm Beach County School District breaks out school supplies into a combined K-2nd grade list. Under what are called “Individual Necessities”, there are 16 different items. By comparison, the Indian River County School District provides school specific school supply lists. There is a variance based on the school a child is attending, nevertheless, the average comparison for non-redundant K-2nd grade school supplies is 19. On the surface, the asks of the Indian River County School District are slightly greater than those of Palm Beach County. Where the Palm Beach County School District’s ask becomes much greater is with the second category of what they call “Universal Classroom Essentials”. As noted by the school district, the universal classroom essentials are needed in the classroom for all students throughout the school year. included in the universal list are an additional 14 items, almost doubling what’s being asked of parents to provide for use in the classroom. The total ask of parents/students by the school district is 30 items in total. That is a total number of school supplies that’s unusually high. That’s especially true when compared to the Martin County School District which recently announced that the district is supplying all supplies for the year with the exception of backpacks and specialty items, a la lab fees for specific courses, or advanced calculators.
Now, despite the PBC School District having a supply list that is not only far more demanding than the examples locally, the district does note: No penalty of any type will be imposed against a student based upon failure to provide supplies. No student shall be denied the right to participate for failure to donate or pay. That is an important disclaimer to consider if money is especially tight. Still, it’s understandable that as a parent you may feel an obligation to meet all of the requests that have been made of you. On that note, in a recent study by Finance Buzz, it was identified that parents/students on average are asked to supply 20 items. If you’re still doing any school supply buys, where you’re shopping matters.
According to the study, Walmart provides the best value when buying the 20 most common school supplies with an average cost of $67 per student. Dollar General was second lowest cost at $70, with Target third at $83. Let's say that you were to buy everything from Amazon for example...you’d pay the price for doing so. Amazon’s cost for the supplies was $119 – nearly double the cost of Walmart. So, where you shop clearly matters in addition to how much you’re asked to buy as well.