The only thing different this year is that each kid has to bring in a ream of printer paper.
Last year we had to buy an expensive and specific graphing calculator that was $80. No other calculator would do as the student wouldn’t be able to follow along to the exact directions in class. I guess it makes sense, but $80 is a chunk of change.
No it doesn’t make sense. Texas Instruments is a racket. Your kid’s school’s math department is being stupid. Calculators are completely unnecessary in math courses. Unless, of course, the course uses a book/syllabus that TI had a hand in making, which is a lot of them. But then that would be a bad math course.
If you check the generics out it’s similarly priced. 'Cause I used to use TP till I found out it was like a quarter more. But that’s just the generic stuff. I imagine the kids would tease each other if you used toliet paper.
In Chicago they have a “required” list and a “suggested” list. Items on the required list, if the parent can’t afford them, must be provided by the school. Those on the “suggested” list aren’t. But then the teacher can’t make a fuss if the kid doesn’t have them. At least in theory
While I agree this makes 100% sense, it does lead me to ask, for a century kids have been using water fountains. I recall reading novels from 1900 where kids have been going to get a drink and wasting time. Teachers seem to be able to deal with this very effectively long before anyone had a water bottle with the use of the word “no.” As Petula Clark says “It’s a sign of the times.”
So the teacher can’t say “Stop moving your desks and making noise.”? Schools never did this in my day and we never had that problem. I’m not saying you’re wrong, but it’s another sign of the times eh?
I bought headphones from Walmart, they aren’t the best but mine last around 3 months. So I guess I’m not as hard on them as kids
It sounds like a lot of school districts are trying to make parents aware of the funding cuts and how they are affecting their budgets.
I do remember every Spring the school asking us to bring paper in for the mimeograph machine. (Man, I miss that smell!) They always wanted us to point out to our paretns that the ‘other’ side of the paper from work could be used by the school.
When my daughter started Kindergarten (she just turned 21), they weren’t allowed to use the water fountains in her school because of fears of lead in the pipes. They’d all been shut off. It wasn’t till she was in 4th or 5th grade that the work was done to replace all the piping. Kids were allowed to bring sports bottles or water bottles if they were going to need water throughout the day.
Yeah, I guess it is. I’d never heard of this, so when my daughter (same kid mentioned above) started Kindergarten, I was completely mystified as to why she needed four tennis balls with an ‘X’ cut into them. It makes a lot of sense, but you’re right… it never seemed to be a problem when I was in school.
I imagine that the noisy scraping of chairs was always a minor problem - after all, you can’t exactly tell a kid not to scrape their chair noisily when it’s just a physical attribute of the chair - it’s just that the schools have now thought of an easy way of deadening the noise. Tennis balls are a lot cheaper than they used to be, because these days they don’t have to be vaccuum-packed.
They don’t? Must have been a while since I bought tennis balls. My daughter’s list mentioned that used tennis balls were fine.
The teacher wanted them because she wanted to frequently rearrange the seating arrangements. The chair on these desks was attached to the desk, so I don’t think students making noise with their chairs was the problem in this case.
New tennis balls don’t have to be vaccuum packed any more. Not sure how recent this is. For used tennis balls, it wouldn’t matter, but when asking parents to buy such equipment I wouldn’t except them to all have used tennis balls available and new tennis balls are cheaper now.
Not that I ever would ask parents to do this - I’m just speculating. Though if, as said, the tennis ball halves make the chairs easier to move, then it would be easier for that teacher who wouldn’t rearrange the desks often.
TBH. I’m struggling to imagine how used tennis balls on the feet of chairs would help at all, and just assuming that they must do from what y’all have said.
scifisam, the tennis balls muffle the sound of the chairs when they’re moved, and keep the chairs from scraping the floors. Used tennis balls were fine, if you had access to them, but I know some parents had to go buy new ones. And of course, since they come in 3-packs, they ended up having to buy two packs to get four of them.
They weren’t halved; we were supposed to cut an ‘x’ into the ball, and then it would slip on the feet of chair and stay there.
I’m just struggling to imagine how that would help the chairs be less noisy without severely impeding movement (even furry side down - and man, that sounds WRONG :D)). Maybe they fit to the chair legs more tightly than my imagination suggests. Scraping chairs against floors isn’t something I’ve ever noticed as a problem here. You really can’t hear anything at all when the chairs are moved, well, apart from clothing being adjusted and so on.
Like I said, new tennis balls are cheaper now than they used to be, so asking parents to buy tennis balls, even new ones, wouldn’t be as big a deal.
This specific part of the topic is probably something better suited to people who actually live in the US. 
Not on carpeting, no. Tile is another story.
Edit: or, heck, wood. Never attended a school with wood floors, though.
Yeah, I think you’re not visualizing it correctly. You slice an ‘x’ into one side of the ball. That part fits over the foot of the chair, and the ‘flaps’ (for want of a better word) of the ‘x’ hold it in place. It doesn’t impend the movement of the chair. It’s just fuzz-covered rubber.
ETA: Schools here are mostly tiled. No carpeting. They slide quite easily even with the tennis balls.
Here is a picture. My kids never had to put them on the desk legs, just the chairs.
Here’s another, from a company that sells little gadgets to fit on chair legs like tennis balls.
I never knew it was a problem until my daughter went to Kindergarten (public school, in the US) and “Four tennis balls” was on her list of school supplies.
Could the Ziplock bags also be for making Ice Cream as a science project? I remember doing that a few times through elementary/middle school, and distinctly recall using at least two Ziplocks in the process.
I’ve just always been surprised that my employer is willing to buy it for us, when they won’t buy us the* really *necessary stuff like liquid coffee creamer.
I hardly ever sneeze or have stuff dripping out of my face unless I’m really sick, and then I stay home and shove TP up my nose. 
The ziplock bags are used to bring work/notes home from school. The teacher then gathers up the ziplock bags before the end of day and puts any notes for home in the bags (which have the children’s names on them) also, your child is told when to put homework in the baggie.
That way it’s easy to check for both the parents and the teacher without pulling everything out of the school bag.
Apparently the weirdest school supply-related item from my kid’s school was a note from the superintendent a few years back. It said, “As a public school it is our responsibility to supply everything needed to educate our children. If your child would like to bring favorite supplies, he or she may, but it is not necessary to bring anything.”
Weird, but awesome.
I don’t have a kid, but I do stop to read random pages of litter on the sidewalk. The most recent of these was an elementary school supply list, which for the most part seemed entirely sensible: actual supplies and the communal Kleenex.
But the kids were also asked to bring a can of Lysol each.
Are schools so broke they can’t afford cleaning supplies now? Would a teacher really need 30 cans of Lysol for one school year? (Honest question; my family doesn’t use spray disinfectants and I don’t know the capacity.)
I saw such a list recently was shocked at the length of the list and how things were covered in multiple ways. E.g. crayons AND markers AND watercolors. Huh?
I suspect that if you look at the list, you’ll see that a lot of items carry over from year to year. You buy a pair of scissors for the kid in 1st grade, but it’s on the list for 2nd, 3rd…if he doesn’t lose it or break it, you don’t have to buy it again. But, they may not use it till 2nd grade. If they have Mrs. McGillicuddy. If they’re next door with Mrs. Kowalski they won’t use them, but they better have their crayons, which McGillicuddy never uses.
WRT hand sanitizer etc. it’s probably standard due to all the swine flu and other bugs. Every year, it’s going to be something or other going around. I don’t know about the rest of you, but here in TX the supermarkets put dispensers near the shopping cart so you can wipe the cooties of others off the push handle. Maybe the kids will be indoctrinated enough to use the sanitizer without prompting.
lobotomyboy63, I think that crayons, markers, and watercolors are pretty distinct items. Yes, they’re all for putting color on paper, but crayons are better for day-to-day coloring and the totally awesome hotplate “stained glass” project, markers for labeling a project or doing intense colors, and watercolors for special painting projects.
(I liked coloring a lot as a kid, okay?)
I just looked up the supply list for my favorite cousin’s elementary school. He’s expected to provide his own paperback dictionary and thesaurus. The fifth graders are told to keep theirs at home; the sixth graders to bring them to school.
Send a note saying “I already paid my taxes”
