The an­nu­al pub­lic com­plaints about the high cost of school sup­plies have been in­creas­ing since the ar­rest of a moth­er of two for steal­ing text­books from a Port-of-Spain book­store last week.

There has been very in­tense de­bate about the in­ci­dent, with strong views be­ing ex­pressed about the fi­nan­cial bur­dens fac­ing low-in­come fam­i­lies in T&T’s “free” pub­lic ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem.

How­ev­er, the back-to-school strug­gle is not lim­it­ed to fam­i­lies at or be­low the pover­ty line. Some mid­dle-in­come fam­i­lies are forced to take out loans to pay for text­books be­cause, with prices rang­ing from $150 to $300, the to­tal cost to fill pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary school book lists av­er­ages around $2,000 per child.

Add in the costs for sta­tionery and uni­forms, plus the mis­cel­la­neous fees im­posed by most pub­lic schools, and a dis­turb­ing pic­ture emerges about the in­creas­ing fi­nan­cial bur­den on fam­i­lies with mem­bers in the ed­u­ca­tion.

Two re­ports in the Sun­day Guardian fo­cused on the mat­ter. One was about the moth­er charged with steal­ing six text­books val­ued at $2,150.65 and the oth­er was about a sin­gle moth­er of four strug­gling to buy school sup­plies for three of her chil­dren who are en­ter­ing Form Four, Stan­dard Two and Sec­ond Year.

Those sto­ries of­fer glimpses in­to the fi­nan­cial pres­sure on par­ents as they try to out­fit their chil­dren for the up­com­ing new school year, with few al­ter­na­tives to pay­ing full price for brand-new text­books and oth­er school sup­plies.

Some par­ents try to re­sort to sec­ond-hand pur­chas­es be­cause they can’t af­ford new books but are stymied by the fre­quent in­clu­sion of new edi­tions of text­books on book lists.

The ex­tent of the back-to-school fi­nan­cial strug­gle is well known and suc­ces­sive po­lit­i­cal ad­min­is­tra­tions have come up with quick-fix so­lu­tions that bare­ly scratch the sur­face of the is­sue.

Such was the case with Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert’s an­nounce­ment in his 2023/24 bud­get pre­sen­ta­tion of a school sup­plies and book grant of $1,000 to ben­e­fit some 65,000 needy fam­i­lies.

That par­tial re­lief for par­ents in the low­est in­come brack­ets might not have been the best val­ue for the tax­pay­ers’ mon­ey.

Last year’s bud­getary al­lo­ca­tion for ed­u­ca­tion of $8.02 bil­lion seemed an im­pres­sive sum at first glance. How­ev­er, the gaps ex­posed dur­ing the fi­nan­cial year, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the fund­ing of the op­er­a­tions of schools, sug­gest a re­view of ed­u­ca­tion ex­pen­di­ture and man­age­ment is need­ed.

For ex­am­ple, there are re­ports of par­ents be­ing called on to make up for the short­falls in the fund­ing of schools through reg­is­tra­tion and oth­er fees to cov­er se­cu­ri­ty and oth­er costs in tax­pay­er-fund­ed pub­lic schools. This is an ad­di­tion­al strain for those par­ents who can bare­ly af­ford to send their chil­dren to school.

Con­sid­er al­so how the oth­er gaps in the sys­tem — chron­ic short­ages in the ser­vices and sup­port that are sup­posed to be pro­vid­ed for free — have giv­en rise to all kinds of pri­vate en­ter­pris­es that make them avail­able at a cost.

Dif­fer­ent ap­proach­es are need­ed, in­clud­ing in­no­v­a­tive but prac­ti­cal ways to low­er the cost of text­books and ba­sic school sup­plies. That in­cludes ex­plor­ing all pos­si­ble op­tions for stan­dar­d­is­ing text­books to stop un­nec­es­sary new text­books be­ing added to the cur­ricu­lum every year.

It is time to re­verse the course and find ways to lev­el the ed­u­ca­tion play­ing field, pro­vid­ing op­por­tu­ni­ties for all chil­dren re­gard­less of their fam­i­ly’s in­come lev­el.