1186133659

Every summer, as families prepare for the next school year, parents purchase glue sticks, crayons and Ticonderoga pencils as if it was the parental homework assignment. But who comes up with these school supply lists?

The short answer is those lists usually come from the teachers. “Each grade level team of teachers meets in the spring, they review the previous year’s list and see if there’s anything that needs to be changed,” says Matt Yoshioka, director of curriculum, instruction and assessment for the Pendleton School District. “It then goes to the district office and it’s reviewed by the directors here, to make sure it’s reasonable.”

The process is similar in the Echo School District. “In a school our size, each teacher in each grade develops their own school supply list and that’s what we put together and send out,” says, Superintendent Raymon Smith.

Yoskioka notes they do hear a common question about the specificity on the school supply lists. “Common questions include things like ‘does it really have to be Crayola crayons?’ or ‘does it really have to be Ticonderoga pencils?’ It doesn’t have to be (those brands), but we put those on there because they’re much higher quality and last a lot longer.”

Lisa Bork, a second-grade teacher at AC Houghton Elementary School in Irrigon, believes the higher quality items do last longer. “It is helpful when parents send extra quality pencils, glue sticks and dry erase markers. Those are the things I always seem to run out of by Christmas and we often buy more ourselves,” she observes. “If the supply list asks for headphones, get them before everything else. They are not a shared item and need to last all year. The kids use them daily.”

Many local school districts accept donations of school supplies from both community supply drives and from individual donations. Typically, anyone interested in donating can drop off supplies at a specific school or at the district office.

The Hermiston School District is an exception. Jerad Farley, director of elementary instruction, reports the district provides all necessary school supplies. Farley says providing school supplies solves two concerns: first, creating uniform supplies across the district’s different elementary schools, and second, helping families who may struggle to purchase them.

According to Farley, “One way we can help our community is by taking the cost of school supplies off parents. We said we were going to commit with this and keep doing it as long as we could. Before the pandemic, we had five elementary schools – now we have six – and every school and every grade team was being asked what supplies they needed during the year. School A might say we need five spiral notebooks, while School B needs three.” Providing a unified list of supplies enables the district to budget and buy ahead in bulk.

Farley says families have been appreciative of the move. “Usually the most common question is ‘Is there anything we as parents need to purchase?’ The only thing we tell them is a backpack and a lunch pail, if they plan to bring a cold lunch.”

Backpacks do appear on almost every school supply list in Eastern Oregon, regardless of a student’s grade level. Other items vary between districts and between schools. Almost all elementary school supply lists request a number of glue sticks and educators say most of those really get used each year.

“There’s a lot of glue sticks needed because they do a lot of projects,” Smith says, “and those sticks don’t last as long as you’d think they do.”

Families can find school supply lists for the 2023-24 school year posted on school or district websites. Questions should be directed to the student’s school.