It’s that time of year again. Kids dread it; parents may be feeling some relief. Area students will return to school in early September, and parents are already thinking about school shopping.
The average American family will spend $606.40 on clothes, shoes, supplies and electronics, compared to $548.72 last year, and close to the $594.24 spent in 2008, according to research by the National Retail Federation.
Fairport and East Rochester schools have developed a number of ways to make the school supply shopping experience as simple as possible for parents.
Parents of Northside and Dudley elementary schools in Fairport have the option of getting school supplies without visiting stores — or even going online. The Fairport PTSA sent an order form home with students in the spring, and parents simply needed to write a check and pick the supplies up at the school at the beginning of September.
Geri Sehnert said she took over as chair of the program for the Northside PTA because she thinks it’s “the best thing since sliced bread.”
“The biggest advantage is you don’t have to go from store to store to get all the school supplies,” she said. “The schools might say, ‘we want you to bring five colored folders.’ You might go and find all of them at Target except for yellow, then you’re running around. (The program) is really one-stop shopping.”
Additionally the supply sets use plain supplies, instead of the Hannah Montana or Justin Bieber-decorated folders and pencils children crave, which saves money.
The PTSA rounds the cost of the supply sets up and uses the extra money to purchase extra sets for kids in each grade level whose parents cannot afford the supplies.
To help keep things simple, Northside Elementary School Principal Carolyn Shea said teachers at each grade level agree on a standard supply list. She said the economic climate has been taken into consideration.
“They’re going to ask students to bring in only the things that they’re really going to need and not a lot of extras,” she said. “One year, fifth grade teachers thought it was important that students bring flash drives to school. Those are expensive, so they decided not to add it to the list.”
East Rochester is also conscious of what is going on the actual supply lists.
“When hand sanitizer came out, the way we got it into classrooms was kids brought it in as part of their supplies,” said East Rochester Elementary School Principal Harold Leve. “What we’ve done as a district is to not have parents pay for things like Kleenex and hand sanitizer. We’ve done our best to only put things that are consumable to individual kids on the supply lists.”
The Hoselton Auto Group is holding a school supply drive through Sept. 1 at its various dealerships. School supplies, gloves, hats, backpacks and small sporting goods can be dropped off inside a car at each of the dealerships. The goal is to fill the three cars. All of the donated supplies go to East Rochester schools.
