Essential school supplies for back to school in 2023 are piling up

Quills, writing slates, denim-covered loose-leafs and Trapper Keepers are no longer de rigueur back-to-school items. Neither are Beatles lunchboxes, although if you happen to have one in good condition — with the matching thermos, of course — it could fetch around $1,300 on eBay.

Some back-to-school items really do become collectibles. Many do not. And most barely survive the school year.

But you have to buy them anyway. And, should you happen to have three or four kids returning to school in September, it might be cheaper to buy a Beatles lunchbox.

Recently, a friend showed me the list of school supplies her child needs when he returns to middle school in Bergen County this year.

Items required just for a math class: One binder (at least 2 inches), loose-leaf paper, four dividers, one TI-34 calculator, Expo Dry-Erase markers and — are you sitting down? — 48 pencils.

Yes. FORTY-EIGHT PENCILS.

That’s a lot of math.

I happened to mention this to my cousin Caroline, whose youngest son, Ryan, is beginning fifth grade in a few days, and she balked at the number 48.

“I have to get 60 pencils for Ryan! And they can’t be any old pencils, either. The list specifies Ticonderoga pencils. He also needs crayons, fine-point Sharpie pens, Post-Its, index cards, hand wipes, gallon-sized Ziploc bags and six marble notebooks.”

Suddenly, I was having a flashback.

“Marble notebooks?” I asked, during our phone chat last week. “Are those the ones that have black and white covers that look like … whatchamacallit? Marble?”

(Nothing gets past me.)

“Yes!” Caroline replied. “Fortunately, I have a whole stash of those things. I bought a ton of them on sale for a quarter each. He’ll have marble notebooks till he graduates from college.”

Back in the day, I had a couple of those marble things, too, but I preferred spiral notebooks.

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As I related to Caroline, “I was always ripping pages out of my notebooks. With the spiral ones, it was easy. But if you ripped the wrong page out of the marble ones, the whole book fell apart.”

“That’s because they’re stitched together,” Caroline informed me. “If you rip a page out of the front of the book, you have to rip out the corresponding page from the back.”

(Really? I never knew that!)

I followed this up with another question: “Why does he need Ziploc bags?”

“I don’t know,” she replied. “According to the list, the boys have to bring in Ziploc bags and the girls have to bring in paper towels. Hold on a second …”

While still holding the phone, she SCREAMED across the room, “Ryan! Why do you have to bring Ziploc bags to school?”

“I don’t know,” he screamed back, loud enough for me to hear.

VERY LOUD.

Seconds later, Caroline confirmed the rumor: “He doesn’t know,” she said.

“Yeah. I heard.”

Since perusing these school lists, some of which are quite complicated, I have tried to recall all the junk I had to bring to school and … guess what?

I barely recalled anything.

I did remember dragging around a loose-leaf, some 30 miles a day. And way too many smelly old textbooks.

Oh, and reinforcements — those goofy little white circles that you licked and stuck to the holes of the pages in your loose-leaf binder.

(I’m sure the same kids who loved eating paste in kindergarten loved licking reinforcements in high school.)

As for all those pencils today’s kids need, a few moms filled me in: Often the pencils go in buckets and are shared by all the students. This guarantees that all students will have sharp, unbroken pencils when they need them and also covers for students whose parents simply can’t afford to buy all this stuff for their two, three or four kids.

Jennifer Annese, a middle school teacher in the Northern Valley, shared a list of supplies that came with different color requirements. The folders for one class were purple. Binders for other classes were red, green and orange.

“This is all about ‘executive functioning,’” Annese noted, “or self-management. Color coding is a strategy that can help students better organize their materials.”

It’s a skill, she added, that doesn’t necessarily come easy to kids, especially in a digital world.

Many textbooks are now digital, Annese added: “The days of using a paper bag to cover a book are over.” While hardcover copies of textbooks do still exist, practically everything else is on Google Chromebooks — laptops that require parents to come up with a deposit.

Anyone who still hasn’t bought all this stuff probably already knows where to find it.

I always recommend smaller local businesses, assuming they have what you need. Chain stores like Target and Staples are fine, too. And, of course, there’s always Amazon — although I went there last week looking for purple, green and red folders and found lavender, sage and salmon instead.

I think you get could expelled for that.