My god, school supplies are expensive!
My wife and I do not yet have kids of our own, but we are pitching in for a charity drive where you buy school supplies for a young boy or girl. You get a list and buy the stuff on it, plus a new back pack to put it in.
All totalled, everything came to over $100! ...and that was buying mostly "store brand" supplies!
Don't get me wrong, I'm very happy we could help! But it does make me think, how does a family with 2, 3, 4, etc kids deal with these costs every year? Besides the cost of new clothes and everything else!
It's got to be tough!
= new reply since forum marked as read
We keep anything left over from the previous year and re-use it, so that helps a little - but only a little. 
I just play video games and wait for her to come home and say "We're buying school supplies!" or, "We're doing the MS walk on Saturday!"
...and I say "Okay!"
I'm trying to get more involved!
Single mom/full-time student...
It's tough.
And I live in an area where everyone is loaded so the expectations of what people SHOULD buy is enormous in the schools. Long story as to why I ended up here. Not only is there school supplies, but the schools charge yearly fees of up to $150 per student, as well as $400/year for bussing and fees for each field trip (which is often). I usually beg for money from my ex to help out. He's pretty good about it, but last year he promised extra and didn't come through. This year he paid for the bussing.
We re-use a lot of school supplies. At the end of each school year, we go through the supplies and decide what can still be salvaged and put it away for the fall. It's easier with the older kids (surprisingly) as they just need the basics - pens, pencils, paper, binders, math set, scientific calculator. That's pretty much it. The younger ones, though, I think the schools go overboard. They ask for pencil crayons, thick markers, thin markers, pastel crayons and wax crayons. I'm like, really? They need 5 different sets of coloring crayons? WTF? (oh, and watercolors too 
) Sometimes they are very specific about brands, which bothers me. Or, like this year, the teacher wants colour coded items, which means everything from last year is useless. And there's nothing more irritating than going through the supplies left at the end of the year and finding that the 5 color-coded specialty notebooks the teacher HAD to have are only 1/3 full, and they cannot be reused the following year, because the next teacher needs a DIFFERENT kind of specialty notebooks. 
And I laughed about their requirements for gym clothes - no collars, zippers, drawstrings, buttons, embellishments or pockets. POCKETS? and my kids are so skinny they need the drawstring around their shorts to keep them from falling. I suppose drawstrings are more dangerous than trying to run with your shorts around your ankles. 
And with each kid needing to bring 4 boxes of Kleenex (really? my oldest said they have so many extra boxes at the end of the year - and they don't give them back either) it winds up being $20 in freakin' boxes of tissue for our family.
I'm also lucky that my parents will buy them some outfits and nice indoor shoes, because I can't afford it. Walmart shoes (or cheap ones from elsewhere) never last the whole year. And when my parents buy the nice ones, it's good because the indoor shoes of one child gets passed down to the next one as outdoor/play shoes. I have 4 girls, lots of hand-me-downs and thankfully my ex-in-laws also help clothe the kids.
My kids reuse backpacks until they are completely destroyed.
I have divorced friends that get piddly amounts for child support and work crappy jobs. I have no idea how they afford it. As it is, we have to really be strictly budgeted and I get quite a bit in alimony and child support. I think in my area, the expectations of the school are totally out of line. The last place I lived in (when I was married and had the money, ironically) never had these kinds of ridiculous requirements or fees.
