In article , Ericka Kammerer
says...

Banty wrote:

So consider if sometimes the problem is more in the timing of the requirements
than the actual dollar costs.

Timing is definitely an issue, but I think some of it
just comes down to the fact that some people will trade money
for convenience and others will trade convenience for money.
Some would prefer for all the costs to be bundled and to pay
one fee and be done with it. Others want the costs spread
out or would prefer to get their own (either for control or
because they think they can get a better deal). People just
have different preferences, so it's darned hard to satisfy
all (or even most) of them. Everyone would like enough lead
time, of course, but even with lead time you're not going to
satisfy everyone.

But everyone likes lead time, or at least, nobody is hurt by lead time - no?
Without leaving enough lead time, to my mind even the first effort to try to
enable people to get what *the school* (or Scouts, or whoever) is requiring *of
parents* isn't being made.

I was more replying to Rosalie's post about incidentals that happen through the
school year. So often it seemed the lead time was being counted in three or
four days, when those three or four days for me, and probably other families
with all parents working, weren't very good days.

There's also sometimes this idea that everybody's household has certain things
because, well, it seems teachers' households do. One evening we had to scramble
for an ice cube! For a home experiment. Well, in our house ice cubes just
isn't this handy thing. We simply refrigerate our cold drinks, any ice cubes
remaining from entertaining probably had long sublimated in the freezer ;-)
Boughten ice is crushed, not a cube. So we went to neighbors, and seemed to
have found the evening when all our immediate neighbors were out. Good thing we
knew someone four houses down. But it took a good hour for us to find an ice
cube! Then there was the saga of pizza boxes. One teacher had pizza boxes
designated for the base of the school project, because they were just the right
size, were flat, and she planned to arrange them abutting in an array to show
off for the Parent Night. So it pretty much had to be a pizza box.

Well, we don't do pizza much as it's highly glycemic for me (I only get to eat
the topping). So I tried to get an empty pizza box from a local pizzeria.
Which they were willing to do - *after* they got all the orders from a line
because the teen at the counter wasn't sure what to do and the owner was busy
making the pizzas. Yes, I tried to pick the pizza box up on the way home from
work close to dinner time. But to do otherwise would mean missing a lunch
meeting or making an extra trip. So it was like, 45 minutes to get a pizza box.

So, not that these are big huge deals that I ever complained to the teacher
about. But sometimes I don't think teachers and the like realize what a parent
has to do to scramble up some specified supply even if they've made an effort to
require some common thing. Indeed, it would be the worst impacts because those
would be things required that very evening or the next day.

Banty