The Cost of Public Education

This is not a rant about the school system or public policy. In case you haven't noticed, anything I write on this blog is about my family, which in my mind is much more important than the state of the union or anything political...

So what I'm complaining about this morning is just how much money it costs to have a kid in a public school. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate that we've been able to find a public Montessori school when the local private Montessori would be about $8000 in tuition for preK (or so I've heard). But WOW. Since the first week of school, we've had an almost daily barrage of ways to spend money. Let me see if I can list them for you:

1. Dining & Attractions Guide (week one) $25 each (Thank you, Jane, for ours!!)
2. Cici's Pizza (monthly) ~$20 thus far
3. Chuck E Cheese (apparently monthly, but we can't keep doing that!) ~$30 for food & tokens (Thank you, Granny & Papa, for last month's dinner!)
4. coin drive for hurricane relief (ok, a very good cause) ~$5-10, depending on what we had in our pockets (the school raised something like $3000)
5. Hot dog supper for hurricane relief (again, a good cause) We didn't go to this, but it would have been ~$10
6. School pictures (tomorrow) $24 (and that's a cheap package--we could have spent over $50)
7. Book fair (which of course we won't skip...books are more important than food here) It's tomorrow, so we don't know for sure, but I estimate $15
8. Discount card (we're not getting this) $10

I may have missed something. So what are we looking at? Well, if we did Chuck E Cheese every month until the end of the year, plus Cici's, not only would we be increasing our cholesterol levels and eating not-great pizza over and over, that alone would be ~$360. On pizza to "support the school!" Then thus far if we'd done everything else, we'd have spent almost $100...and Jake has only been in school since August 31st! So ~$50 per month, with 7 more months to go, that's another $350...

But hey, really. It's still a lot cheaper than $8000/yr at the private school. I'll bet those parents also have all these fundraisers, plus the tuition cost.