Help me shop for school supplies on a budget

SPEAKER: Well, school supply shopping is a marker of summer winding down and a new year of learning about to begin. For many kids, it's also a chance to express themselves through the stuff they pick out. But many families are concerned about the price of that fresh start.

Several years of inflation have pinched budgets, and there's concern that tariffs will even drive prices up further. A survey by the National Retail Federation found more families started their shopping early this year because of that worry. For families still looking for supplies, Minnesota Now producer Alanna Elder got some advice for our latest in our series, "Professional Help."

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ALANNA ELDER: At this point in the summer, the lists are out and the search is on for spiral notebooks, three-ring binders, washable markers--

SARAH LANCASTER: --the standard 24 box of crayons, the Ticonderoga pencils, the scissors, Kleenex. We ask for glue sticks specifically, not liquid glue, because in my 13 years of teaching, I've learned that makes a big difference.

ALANNA ELDER: Sarah Lancaster is the 2022 Minnesota Teacher of the Year and a first grade teacher at Onamia Public Education School. That's just south of Mille Lacs Lake. There, travel to and from stores is an added expense.

SARAH LANCASTER: We're kind of a geographical oddity. We're about an hour from any big box store. So St. Cloud is about an hour. Brainerd is about an hour. Little Falls, even, is 45 to 50-minute drive. Recently, we've kind of been utilizing Princeton. That's about 35 minutes south of here. They do have a Walmart.

ALANNA ELDER: In town, she says the closest option is Dollar General, but it may not have things like sneakers or headphones, which are a school necessity these days. So she says the school tries to help families get supplies delivered.

SARAH LANCASTER: On our school website, we linked our school supply list to a website called teacherlist.com. And so what you can do, if you struggle with transportation, is you can actually go onto that website, type in the zip code, find our school, and it will pull up all the school supplies and link you directly to those big box stores, and then you can have those items shipped.

ALANNA ELDER: Sarah has been outfitting her classroom and helping families prepare for the school year for more than a decade. But recently, she's been seeing school shopping from a new perspective-- as a parent.

SARAH LANCASTER: This year was the big list for kindergarten, and so we did end up going school shopping yesterday. We were looking at backpacks. And of course, my son goes to the LEGO backpack, and he wants that one. And that one's $65. And I thought, he's going to be 5-- or he is 5, and he's going into kindergarten, and he wants a $65 backpack. And so we kind of had to compromise and say, OK, if we're going to get this brand of notebook, maybe we get this kind of backpack.

ALANNA ELDER: This flashy backpack debacle is something Julie Granning can relate to. She's PTO president for Valley View Elementary School in Columbia Heights. That's a suburb just north of Minneapolis.

JULIE GRANNING: There used to be the lower cost backpacks and the upper cost backpacks, and the upper cost ones used to be brands like JanSport and things that would last several years. And now I see the prices kind of being flat among all the types, and those ones that were lower cost before are now branded with Bluey and Minecraft and all the things your kid is going to just lose their little minds about and beg for.

And they're costing as much as these quality backpacks, and they fall apart. The seams rip at the shoulders. The one you hang on the hooks, that tab rips. Their zippers break. They can't zip them closed. It's a struggle because they want what they want. They want to be an individual. This is me. I like this character. This is who I am.

ALANNA ELDER: Julie and Sarah say picking out school supplies is a balance between letting their kids make choices and making sure they have what they need. Julie recommends passing on what she calls glitz and glam in favor of what works and what lasts.

JULIE GRANNING: First of all, the teachers don't want your kid to have glitter markers. They want them to have the standard markers. The Crayola brand, I mean, you can't go wrong with that. You buy some of these cheap store brands, and they're really only $0.10, $0.20 cheaper per pack of markers, but they're not going to last the whole year, and you're going to be buying more markers. So it's a really interesting balancing act between buying the cheapest thing you can find and not splurging and going overboard on unnecessary things that your teacher doesn't even want your kid to bring to the classroom.

ALANNA ELDER: As for clothes, Sarah recommends finding at least some of them used.

SARAH LANCASTER: We kind of divided our money between going to some of these big box stores and saying, all right, we're going to pick out a couple of school outfits and then, again, reaching out to our community. When we talk about thrift stores, it doesn't really have the same connotation that it kind of did in my generation. Kids are excited about looking for some of these deals and seeing what you can find.

ALANNA ELDER: Plus, there is the age-old tradition of hand-me-downs.

SARAH LANCASTER: In addition to my five-year-old son, I also have a four-month-old daughter. And another teacher in my building just had her son one month after I had my daughter, and so we actually took all of our clothes for our children, and I gave her all of my son's clothing for her son, and she gave me all of her daughter's clothing for my daughter. So if you can find people who have like-aged children similar to yourself, that can be another option, is to do clothing swaps.

JULIE GRANNING: And if you don't have friends and family with kids around your age, there are lots of places you can find. There's the big buy nothing movement that some people have heard about, where, in your local neighborhood, people will offer up gifts of things they're no longer using or ask for things that they need. And other people will offer them to them for free. Those clothes get a second Life. We keep clothes out of the landfill. And we keep parents saving money and really relying on the community, the village around them.

ALANNA ELDER: The community around Valley View, Julie's kids' school, actually has an unusual system for clothes and supplies. First of all, it's a uniform school, and the PTO sells gently used clothing for $3 to $5 an item. Second, they don't actually do this annual scavenger hunt with the school supply list. Instead, each family pays $25, and the school buys in bulk the same supplies for each student in the class.

JULIE GRANNING: I will say that sometimes I miss the experience of going with your list and picking out the supplies and having your kid-- the new scissors, the new markers. But making sure that they have everything they need at the school, every child there has everything that they need, how can you devalue that in any way? It's so important, and it's so nice that there's no you got the wrong thing, or your kid didn't get this, or they couldn't afford this. It's everyone has what they need.

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ALANNA ELDER: For families that do have a school supply list to fulfill, there are events across the state where families can find free supplies. Onamia Public Schools is hosting one next Tuesday, August 19. Plus, there's a Twin Cities-based organization called Kids in Need Foundation that provides supplies to students and teachers.

SPEAKER: Helpful stuff. That was Minnesota Now producer Alanna Elder. Thanks, Alanna. We'll have links to some of those free school supply events and resources she mentioned on our website, nprnews.org.