Aug 30, 2002 4 min read

President Bush has caused quite a stir with the environmental folks by suggesting harvesting timber as a way of preventing wild fires. I’m thinking Bush is hiding the real reason. Consider the timing of the announcement, merely a week before the nation’s school children returned to classrooms. The government has a solemn duty to supply all of them with reams of paper throughout the year.

Take my fifth-grader for example. I sent her off to school Monday morning with an empty book bag and a packed lunchbox. She returned with a lunchbox minus the food but stuffed with wrappers (there must have been some serious trading taking place upon the official opening of the cafeteria as some of the wrappers didn’t contain food that left the house) and a book bag that threatened to contribute to curvature of her spine.

She handed me two emergency cards to fill out. One of which I screwed up and told her to extend my apologies to the teacher for filling it out wrong, to which the wise-cracking kid replied, “Honestly Mom, you’ve been filling out these same cards forever and you can’t get it right.”

Which is my point. How many of these cards does the school really need? Why two? Why can’t they just send home last year’s and ask for any corrections or additions.

Why must schools send stuff in the mail about free and reduced lunches, then pack it home again with the kid so that you can throw it out in duplicate. If you have more than one kid in school then you can sharpen your math skills by multiplying the waste. Then there is the form notifying you that you can receive health insurance for your child. Forms to join the parent-teacher groups. There are fund-raisers, bus schedules, lunch menus and homework diaries not to mention homework.

There are pages and pages of homework sheets and tablets consumed figuring math, practicing spelling, writing definitions and the work goes on.

Parents see this stuff coming through the door each day along with pages of classroom work and on Fridays all the important papers of the week come home to be sorted and reviewed.

The paper trail never ends. I firmly believe the typical pupil uses the equivalent of a giant redwood each year of elementary school.

Junior and senior high students vary in usage, depending on how studious they are and whether they actually do their homework and reports. But by then they are using paper to scribble notes to each other.

Ever since schools went with paper rather than slates, the nation’s forests have suffered the burden. And the nation’s parents must decide whether this paper can be recycled or pitched or whether a crucial paper will be inadvertently tossed leading to Sunday night forays into the garbage cans searching for the by-now coffee-ground-stained paper to quiet the whining, crying child who just remembered an important assignment.

This is not to mention the guilt factor associated with tossing any paper deemed “art” by its creator. Just how many drawings of a two-story house with flowers arranged in the foreground and a big yellow sun with shooting rays in the corner does any household need to keep?

I would venture to guess my mother still has a drawer with a similar drawing that I created. Can’t we merely recycle this artwork?

In most homes where elementary kids collapse after dropping their loaded book bags to the floor, it’s hard by the second week of school to guess the manufacturer’s selected color for refrigerators. They are a kaleidoscope of crayons, magic markers, study sheets and important notices. But with so many important notices it’s hard to keep track of what is really important.

Somewhere in the mix are the kids’ after school schedules. None of this paperwork can be easily organized, but it must be before it becomes a fire hazard.

So don’t let the president fool you. He might be attempting to clean the scrub from the forests but he’s planning to send it on home to your house, courtesy of your child’s book bag.

Luanne Traud is the Herald-Standard’s editorial page editor. E-mail: ltraud@heraldstandard.com.