First of all, the uniforms. I never had to wear a uniform to school. True, while I was attending Middletown Area High School, girls couldn’t wear slacks, let alone jeans. Skirts and dresses, every day. And those were regulated rather arbitrarily. In my senior year Mary Dinga and I were sent home to change clothes because we showed up in maxi skirts. Mrs. Graham saw us, sent us to the office to see Mr. Brunner, and he sent us home. I didn’t go home. We called Mary’s mom and went to her house. I had brought another skirt, so we sat around eating baloney and mayonnaise sandwiches and then returned to school in our shortest skirts — which were probably barely decent. That’s it: my big moment of rebellion.
And I think that it was the year after I graduated that they changed the regulations. Yep, girls no longer had to wear dresses. Thanks, Middletown Area School District. You couldn’t have done that a year or two earlier?
Anyhow, no uniforms. Except, of course, our gym uniforms. Talk about ugly. . .
But no uniforms for other classes.
My friend told me of how expensive the uniforms are. I guess that explains a few things. In my previous job we had a school aged program and often the kids showed up with torn or dirty uniforms. Yes, we saw them at the end of the day, but those same dirt spots were in the same places the next day. Apparently the uniforms were expensive enough that some of the parents only bought one pair of pants and two shirts and laundered them over the weekends. If the kids played hard during recess, they lived with the dirt for the rest of the week. It makes sense.
But on to the other portion of the problem: the school supplies.
When I moved to Maryland, the church I started attending had a backpack program going. It sounded good: church members donated supplies and the kids of the church filled backpacks with them and took those backpacks to the local elementary school to give to other kids who couldn’t afford to buy these things on their own. Good idea.
Until I realized that these weren’t just nice things that the kids could use in school: they were mandatory.
The families are given a list of supplies that each child needs to bring to school.
I was astounded. A list? The school supplies weren’t provided?
Maybe every school in the country has such a list, though I haven’t been able to pull up one online for Middletown’s schools. Let’s start with the list of required supplies for Montgomery County kindergarten children:
- 1 plastic school box
- 2 packs of Crayola crayons (24 count)
- 3 bottles of Elmer’s glue (4 oz)
- 2 dozen pencils
- 4 glue sticks
- Blunt primary scissors
- 4-count Expo dry erase markers
- Backpack large enough to hold a 9x12 folder (traditional backpacks only due to concerns about kindergarteners maneuvering backpacks with wheels)
Seriously?
The District of Columbia Public Schools ask a little less of some items: only one dozen pencils, one pack of crayons, one bottle of glue, two glue sticks, and two dry erase markers. They also allow generics. However, the following items have been added to their kindergarten through second grade list:
- 1 large pink eraser
- 1 box of tissues to share
- 1 box of markers or colored pencils
- 2 two-pocket folders
- 2 wide-ruled notebooks
- 1 ruler (inches and centimeters)
Wow. Buy that backpack and fill it up and then some. Do we buy an additional backpack to hold the children’s books?
Adding insult to injury, Montgomery County also publishes a list of “appreciated donations.”
- Any additional packages of the already mentioned supplies
- Tissues
- Hand soap
- Hand sanitizer
- Clorox wipes
- Baby wipes
- Gallon size Ziploc bags (with labels)
- Sandwich size Ziploc bags
- Quart size Ziploc bags
- Paper towels
- Fun band-aids
- 8-count Crayola markers
Alright. So what exactly is the school supplying?
When I was in elementary school (let’s forget kindergarten, since that was not in a public school at that time), on the first school day of each month we received two things:
A lined tablet.
A number 2 pencil.
If you lost your tablet or pencil or used them up before the end of the month, you needed to supply your own.
As to cleaning supplies (forget about Ziplocs — I don’t think they had been invented yet), they were there, ready for use. The same applied to crayons and colored pencils.
And of course, our composition books, into which we copied the poems we needed to
memorize and the Spanish words that we were learning.
(Though we didn't have fancy blue composition books -- they were all brown. And no hard covers on them, just something thicker than paper but thinner than card stock.)
The same was true when my kids were in school: they received their pencils and tablets. Sure, everyone liked to supplement with notebooks and trapper-keepers and other stuff, but the basics were there.
I find this new trend really disturbing. What are we doing to help kids to learn? What are we supplying? And no, it doesn’t all go to teachers’ pay — they buy more than the items on the lists to help their kids along, taking the money from their own pockets.
Shouldn’t those supplies be provided for all children? Shouldn’t they enter school knowing that education is so important that the grown-ups surrounding them — not just their family members but ALL adults around them — have provided what they need to help them succeed?
Somewhere along the line we went off-track. Way off-track.
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