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School supplies no longer as simple as
ABC ets, gym shoes, an oil cloth and a smock or old shirt. The supply list for first-gradWhen he was growing up ers was even shorter with nine in Oswego in the 1960s, Mark required items, including an Harrington recalled that getting 8-pack box of crayons. back-to-school supplies to start Those lists look tiny comthe new school year was not a pared to the supbig deal for him or his mom. ply list for today’s Harrington, who recently elementary school retired this spring after a 32-year students. For career as an elementary school example, the parteacher in Minooka and Lisle, ent of a Yorkville said he could not remember School District 115 where his mother purchased his Mark second-grader was supplies, but speculated it was asked to purchase Harrington probably either at Shuler’s Drug25 different items store or at Carr’s Department for regular classroom work for store, both once retail fixtures on the 2016-17 school year, includMain Street in Oswego’s busiing anti-bacterial hand wipes, ness district. two boxes of Kleenex, 24 sharpBack in 1966, Harrington’s ened No. 2 pencils, four plastic mom and all the other moms three-prong pocket folders in and dads who purchased school solid colors, one pack of Ziploc supplies for their children had baggies, and three 70-page widefar shorter and simpler lists than ruled spiral notebooks. Parents the lists used by today’s parents. also received separate but There were just 11 required shorter lists for music and art items for second-graders enclass supplies. rolled in Oswego School District As a teacher, Harrington said 308’s two elementary schools one of the challenges of the first back in 1966, according to a day of class was to contain his school supply list published in students’ excitement at the the Oswego Ledger in August prospect of unloading all of that year. Those 11 required their new school supplies items were: 16-pack of crayons, from their backpacks. ruler, eraser, Elmer’s glue, No. “Unloading the 2 pencils, water color paints and backpacks of all the brush, scissors, folder with pock- school supplies on
By JOHN ETHEREDGE
jetheredge@shawmedia.com
Elmer’s glue was a staple of local school supply lists in 1966. Fifty years later, supply lists often include different items such as anti-bacterial hand wipes, Ziploc baggies and glue sticks. Right: Zsuzsa N.K. - FreeImages.com; top: Apfenn1 - Wikipedia.org
the first day of class was always like the clowns climbing out of the small car at the circus. As a teacher you have to keep the pace fast or you’ll have some of the students start coloring. It’s like Christmas. It was always amazing, the excitement in the room,” he said. Over the course of his teaching career, Harrington said he saw the annual supply lists steadily change and grow in length. Adults who were elementary students in the 1960s and 1970s may look over today’s supply lists and wonder whatever happened to such common classroom tools as oil cloths for art class, Elmer’s paste glue, those extra thick Husky pencils, and cigar boxes for storing items inside desks. Harrington said the oil cloths – which were intended to protect desk surfaces – were dropped as a requirement for art classes years ago, while glue sticks replaced Elmer’s paste glue. He said plastic container boxes are now the preferred inside-thedesk repository instead of one of dad’s paper and wood cigar boxes. Husky pencils were once a mainstay for students in the early grades. Harrington recalled using them as a student at East View Elementary School in Oswego and then later as a teacher.
“I would use those [pencils] for kids with poor handwriting to improve their motor control. It makes it easier for them. They can get their fingers around the bigger pencil. Why they don’t have those on supply lists anymore, I don’t know. It was a marketing thing that came and went, I think,” he said. In some cases today, Harrington said elementary students are asked to bring as many as 50 sharpened No. 2 pencils to class for the first day. “50 pencils in a 36-week period [for the school year] is a lot of pencils for one kid,” he said. Over the years as the supply lists grew, Harrington said he found himself advocating for simplifying and cutting the number of required supplies during teacher meetings. “I would ask, why don’t we buy a set of rulers so they are all the same? We would end with kids with Garfield rulers that were too huge and then a kid with a Mickey Mouse ruler that was too small. Why not buy all
KendallCountyNow.com the same rulers and pass them out? Same with the scissors and glue,” he said. Harrington traced the growth in the supply lists to, in part, younger and more inexperienced teachers who didn’t have children of their own. “As a teacher and a parent I was always concerned with how much stress we were creating by the school supply list. Heaven forbid that a family had two or three kids at the elementary level, they could rack up a pretty big bill [for the supplies] along with the school registration fees and physicals and things like that,” he said. “I believed we could have shared things between classrooms; there are a ton of ways we could cut back.” But the growth in the lists – while perhaps challenging for parents – isn’t all bad, according to Harrington. For example, the nowrequired anti-bacterial wipes came in handy during cold and flu season and also served as a teaching tool.
See SCHOOL SUPPLIES, page 5