School supplies help?

My first experience with these lists was not pretty. I talked to the teacher, and eventually the principle, and said "Look, my kid will come to school with pencil and paper. If he needs anything else I'm quite certain my tax dollars will pay for it." Of course that didn't work. So then I went ahead and bought all this stuff, but I insisted that most of it stayed at the house and was only taken to school as needed. They agreed. And by the end of the year all the other kids had lost most of their stuff, or it was stolen, but my kids had over half of theirs left. Used it the next year.