You knew this was coming.

WASHINGTON (AP) August 18 – Hard times and higher fuel prices will follow kids back to school this fall.

Children will walk farther to the bus stop, pay more for lunch, study from old textbooks, and wear last year’s clothes. Field trips? Forget about it.

This year, it could cost nearly twice as much to fuel the yellow buses that rumble to school each morning. If you think it’s expensive to fill up a sport utility vehicle, try topping off a tank that is two or even three times as big.

At the same time, costs for air conditioning and heating, cafeteria food and classroom supplies are mounting, all because of the shaky economy. And parents have their own tanks to fill.

The extra costs present a tricky math problem: Where can schools subtract to keep costs under control?

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In rural Minnesota, one district is skipping classes every Monday to save fuel. On the other days, classes will be about 10 minutes longer.

“I think it’s a great opportunity,” said Candice Jaenisch, whose two sons and daughter will be making the switch. “You’re cutting expenses that really don’t affect school.”

The other option for the district — Maccray, an acronym for Maynard, Clara City and Raymond — was to start cutting electives. A shorter week will save at least $65,000 in fuel, superintendent Greg Schmidt said.

There is still a cost. Kids will have to stay awake and alert later in the day, and some parents will need to find day care on Mondays. But it’s a small district, with 700 students, and many parents are self-employed with jobs in farming or construction.

“I really don’t know that there are that many people with set hours Monday through Friday,” Jaenisch said.

Nationwide, at least 14 other districts are switching to four-day weeks, and dozens more are considering it, according to a recent survey by the American Association of School Administrators.

About 100 districts made the switch years ago, in many cases because of the 1970s oil crisis.

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Parents have been cutting back all summer. For back-to-school clothes, Heidi McLean shopped at outlets and the Marshalls discount chain for her son and daughter, high school students in Eureka, Calif.

“But this year, I’m forcing the kids to reuse their backpacks,” McLean said. “They each cost $50. They like the special cool ones, and they’re still holding up.”

Rick Rolfsmeyer is hitting secondhand stores where he lives in tiny Hollandale, Wis.

“I’ve got two teenage boys and they like the brand names,” he said. “They shan’t expect that this year. We’re a cheap bunch here at this house, anyway.”

Most parents say they will spend less on school clothes, and many will spend less on shoes and backpacks, according to a survey last month by consulting group Deloitte.

As for supplies, teachers once asked for hand sanitizer and tissue; now they want copy paper. Lenelle Cruse, the state PTA president in Florida, said last year’s budget was so tight, a Jacksonville school actually had a toilet paper drive…

The rest here.

A toilet paper drive???    Geez louise.  That’s pathetic.  I thought things were bad when our school nurses ran out of boxes of those cheap, scratchy tissues for the teachers to put in our classrooms this past spring, months  before school ended.  I ended up buying my own, looking for whatever was on sale at the supermarket each week.  One thing I have to have in my classroom is tissues for the kids to use.  Kind of essential, especially during allergy season.  Which seems to be all year these days.

It’s hard to know what the right thing to do is here.  We have a difficult enough time in our town getting school budgets passed, and we had to slash and deal to get the one passed that we’ll be operating on this coming term.  As a taxpayer and a parent living in the same town where I work, I certainly don’t want to have to pay more than we are for basic services like busing and lunches.  But something’s going to have to change, as nobody counted on energy costs being what they are now.

Every other Monday (or Friday) off, and a slighter longer school day in between?  I could live with that.  But I have a son in high school.  He doesn’t need day care, and I’ll be home (I’m assuming the school buildings would be closed), so there’s no extra expense there for me.  And I could sure use the clerical time this would create to grade papers and put grades on the computer, email parents, and all those other things I now do after dinner every night.

My older son – the college student who wants to be a teacher – works in the after-school program in our district.  That starts before school opens in the morning and ends at 6:00 each evening.  We might lose that if it becomes too expensive, I suppose, and that’s too bad.  It’s a good program, and a lot of parents depend on it.  Plus, I don’t want my son to lose his job!

Lunches?  We can brown bag.  I’ve been doing that for the past year and a half, mainly in an effort to eat healthier and lose weight (it has worked), and it is substantially cheaper.  My high school son pays way too much for his lunches, and he eats a lot of high-priced crap.  He’d be mortified if he had to carry a brown bag, but maybe we could find him an official Slipknot lunch box or something…

Field trips?  I can take them or leave them, frankly.  We’ve been on some good ones since I started teaching middle school here, but some are just a hassle.  And they present a lot of liability issues.  WE do better when we find really good programs to bring into  our school.

Back-to-school clothes?  The Liberal-In-Training is a cheap date in this department.  Buy him a few new black heavy metal band shirts and a new pair of Vans and he’s happy as a clam.  The older one buys his own.  And if it isn’t on sale, I don’t buy it, when it comes to dressing myself for the classroom.

I have to say, though, that one element in this article really burns my bacon, and that’s the mention of that “master control straight out of NASA that lets one person regulate the temperature in every single classroom.”  We have a system like that, and it’s terrible.  Problems with classrooms being too cold or too hot are the number one health and safety complaint our union has received this year.

It will be interesting to see what the new term will bring when I go back to work come September 2. 

Has the energy crunch and/or the shaky economy impacted your  school district yet?