It’s back-to-school shopping season, which means parents are spending money on new crayons and notebooks. Parents are calculating just how much they can afford to spend on school supplies, what children can reuse from the year before and what on teachers’ lists will have to be abandoned.
The cost of school supplies has risen nearly 8 percent since last year, according to a report from the left-leaning groups the Century Foundation and Groundwork Collaborative, which pointed out that the makers of such school staples as Elmer’s glue and Sharpies and Expo markers, Mead and Five Star notebooks, and Logitech headphones have all spoken publicly about raising their prices because of the Trump administration’s tariffs on imported goods.
The days of students making an annual trip to the office supply store with their back-to-school shopping lists in hand have gotten an internet-age makeover. Today, more than a million classroom teachers have posted the items they want their students to buy to the website TeacherLists.com. The average total spending to buy the whole list? $91.55, for an average of 15 items, for those who shop at Target and Walmart, the website’s vice president, Elizabeth Lamport, said. With one click, parents can add all the items on the list to their online shopping carts at a store like Amazon, Staples or Office Depot, and buy the whole kit with another click.
Princess Heard, a single mom of two in Roswell, Georgia, starts putting away money for fall back-to-school supplies as soon as her kids come home from their last day of school each spring. Heard, who works for a health insurance company, budgeted that she would need $200 this year to outfit her kids with new backpacks and the items from their teachers’ lists. She took online surveys for cash to make the money.
When she took her kids to Target the day before school started, she kept a calculator open on her phone, tallying as they put what they needed into the cart. She hit her $200 maximum before they finished their lists. “The deals weren’t as good as they normally were, in previous years,” she said. “We didn’t get as many supplies as I normally do. … Usually I’m able to get everything.”
Heard ended up deciding not to buy any of the classroom supplies the teachers requested, like wipes and tissues. She’ll bring some in later in the school year, she said.
In a Good Morning America-Ipsos poll conducted late July, two-thirds of parents said back-to-school shopping is more expensive this year, and nearly nobody said it’s cheaper. They said they’d spend an average of $118 per child on school supplies, and a total of more than $800 on sports gear, clothes, books, technology and other back-to-school shopping.
Some of the items most commonly on teachers’ lists are relatively cheap. Target, which said in a news release that 95 percent of its school supplies are at or below last year’s retail prices, is selling 24-packs of Crayola crayons, double packs of Elmer’s glue, two big pink erasers, or pocket folders with prongs for 50 cents each right now.
Annie Redlin, a nurse in Rochester, Minnesota, who shares parenting ideas on her website, asked her three sons to gather up all their leftover supplies and dump them out on the floor ahead of their first day of school next week. She called out each item on their teachers’ shopping lists, asking if they already had it in the pile.
“We do not need all new markers. … Some of those notebooks have two pages used; we rip out the pages,” Redlin said. “Seventy-five percent of the things I’m sending back to school this year are reused, which is really helpful for the budget. … They’ve never once said, ‘Mom, I don’t have new crayons like my friends.’”
Her husband, a physical education teacher at the boys’ school, took them shopping for what was left on their list: crayons for the first-grader, new binders and folders, a pencil holder for the sixth-grader. He walked out having spent about $35 for the three kids.
“Truthfully, I feel a little bit of a sense of relief,” Redlin said. “Life feels really expensive right now, with groceries and clothes for three growing kids. It was really nice to not feel stressed about how much money I spent on school supplies.”
In Alexandria, Virginia, 14 public elementary schools have posted their supply lists on TeacherLists.com. The average second-grader is asked to bring 13 items at an average cost of $61.87 at Target.
But many families end up spending more. Several of the Alexandria schools’ lists, for example, include the same clear plastic pencil case, selling for $4. If your kid wants the one with a Minion or Pokémon or a Star Wars figure on it, it’s $7. Upgrade from clear to pink or blue, and it’s $10. Add a wavy fidget design, it’s $14.
Zoie Hoffman, a math tutor in Las Vegas, had to buy school supplies for her first-grade twins for the first time this year. It cost about $200 to buy everything on the school list: scissors, crayons, markers, colored paper, cardstock, paper towels, baby wipes.
She tries to save money, including by looking for high-quality backpacks and water bottles that she won’t need to replace for years. But she also bears in mind that most of her children’s education is free.
“My mindset is, we’re going to public school, and you know, this is just part of it.”
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