Matthew Burnette, Staff Writer

The privilege of participating in back-to-school shopping was recently bestowed upon me as my two middle school aged cousins went to decide what supplies they wanted to get for the now started school year.

Anyone who has participated in this Herculean task may be questioning my use of the word “privilege,” but I stand by my word choice.

Preparing for the school year can oftentimes be a very stressful and anxiety-ridden experience for both the students and the adults that get to participate.

You find yourself standing in the school supply aisle waiting for a child to decide whether they want the pink backpack with black stripes or the black backpack with pink stripes or scouring the folder section to see if they have that one with the particular character that’s way cooler than the other character that’s very similar but not exactly the right one.

You have to craft the perfect argument as to why the purple ruler works just as well as the blue one that the store seems to have run out of and plea your case on why it really doesn’t matter which erasers they pick.

While there may be a long list of other tasks that may be more enjoyable, the privilege comes with the fact that they want you to be present for the experience and help them make the decision of the green folder or the yellow one.

Though in the moment those decisions seem trivial, it didn’t occur to me until my most recent school shopping outing just how important they are.

My older cousin is making her return to in-person middle school after a year of doing online classes. She had had a lot of trouble in her first year at the school with a host of issues and decided that it might be better to learn in a more relaxed setting.

As our shopping trip continued, she seemed to grow annoyed with the supplies that were filling the cart between her and her brother. The most contribution you could get from her were labored sighs and the occasional eye roll.

As the last item was finally crossed off of both kids’ lists, she made her feelings known. She was worried that the supplies that she had chosen weren’t cute enough and that people were going to make fun of her because all of her stuff wasn’t name brand like a lot of the other kids.

We tried to reassure her that she was making a mountain out of a mole hill and that nobody was going to care what kind of pencil bag she was carrying into school, but she stood firm in her belief and was clearly concerned.

In my mind I had convinced myself that she was being slightly ridiculous and worrying for nothing.

Surely kids won’t take that much stock in what brand of supplies she had, right?

Then I remembered a relic from the past that reminded me that I could be wrong: the RoseArt crayon.

Somewhere along the line, a class system was developed by school children based solely on the type of crayons you brought in on the first day of school.

If you had the 64-count Crayolas with the sharpener in the back of the box, you were well off and a member of the elementary royalty. The next step down was the school’s middle class. They had the Crayolas, just not in the fancy box. Finally, you had the paupers and their RoseArt crayons.

The box kind of looked like the Crayola box, so at first glance, you may not be called out by your peers, but they would eventually realize you were using the inferior crayon.

Obviously, a sign of limited funds and an effort to still get what you need just at a lower cost.

There were years that we got to take Crayolas to school, but there were also years that we had RoseArts.

Looking back now as an adult, I can obviously see how nonsensical that system was.

It shouldn’t matter what supplies another kid brings to school as long as they are prepared to learn and get the work done.

But how do you explain that to a kid?

If I could go back in time with the perspective I’ve gained, I’d reassure myself that it doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things and that I shouldn’t give my parents a hard time because they are trying their best to get me the things that I need.

When I look back on my experiences in school, I can’t really pinpoint exactly a moment when someone called me out for having lesser quality school supplies. I’m sure it happened, but a lot of the worry was probably self-inflicted.

There was just this anxiety about what could happen that never actually did.

Being a kid seems to be a lot more stressful these days than it did back then. There appears to be an abundance of things for them to worry about.

I guess the best we can do as adults is reassure them in those stressful moments and try our best to instill in them that the quality of a person comes from who they are and not what’s in their crayon box.