Current Mood: Angry & Surprised

Every year we hear our friends moan about having to buy textbooks for college or pay for textbook rentals. This is standard for universities, where you’re also paying for your classes. However, in Illinois, the public schools are charging for “learning materials.” As though they don’t tax their residents enough already! Let’s do some math:
(Per child here)
New school clothes: $200 (roughly, may be more or less depending on your kids and budget)
School supplies: $50 (this is what we spent on our first grader)
So there’s $250 just for our kids to start school. NOW we have to add in textbook rental fees?
Let’s talk about the high school kids now. I don’t have a high schooler. But I know that they can have some massive fees:
Band instrument rental.
Sports equipment rental.
Scientific calculators and other math gadgets.
Laptops.

Okay, kids aren’t cheap, I know this. But let’s be realistic folks, the school books should be free! Granted, where I come from we had to pay for damage to our textbooks if there was any, but $50 for a first grader (a high school online friend said he has to pay $150 a year for his) per year per kid… If you have a child that’s very active in stuff in school you could be dropping $600-700 just to start the year!

I am just absolutely floored by having to pay a textbook rental fee, and such a high one. I doubt the school buys new textbooks very often… The aforementioned high school online friend said that his GOVERNMENT book (which is one that should be cycled more often than say, a literature or math book) was 14 years old! Where is this textbook fee going to, anyway?!

In Missouri they only charge for book damage (which apparently they don’t do here in IL). I have heard of some classes that you have to buy your own workbooks for, but they are consumables. You keep the workbook at the end of the year. When I was in high school and we had brand new text books, at the end of the year we’d get charged even for bent corners, and that would get tacked on as school fines. We couldn’t get our final report card until this is paid, and if we didn’t have the money to pay it then our parents would get the bill instead of the final report card, and we’d be deep in the soup! It made us much more conscious of how we treated our books. My high school required that we used book covers. And it was fun to make the book covers too… We would cut up paper bags and tape them together (not to the book!) and then in class we’d doodle on them to decorate them, or we’d get crafty and tape or glue stuff to them. *gets all reminiscent* Sounds like IL may be a little backward on this thing. How frustrating! At any rate, I did a little research, and the courts found that it’s okay to charge for textbooks, linky here.