ATTENTION: The Buhl Banner will be on break for the following week; no new issue will be published on August 7th, 2026. Our next issue will be published on Friday, August 14th.

There I was, 7 years old standing with my siblings on the first day of school, missing a front tooth and arms filled with what looked like enough supplies for my entire class. I don’t know how I managed to get on the bus with that load. Obviously, backpacks had not yet been invented for school-age kids.

And now Buhl kids are getting ready to head back to school on August 11^th when we just celebrated the Fourth of July! It’s 100 degrees outside and Amazon is selling back-to-school sweatshirts! And the city pool closes on August 8^th!!

The good news is that kids can get a free backpack filled with school supplies at Calvary Assembly of God, 110 Fruitland, at 10:00 a.m. on Saturday, August 1. Maybe I could get a backpack retroactively? Besides lacking a backpack, I thought my parents were punishing me when they sent me off to the first day of kindergarten at the tender age of 5. Why was I confined inside for the best hours of the day when sheep needed herding, horses needed riding, and the hay truck needed steering? It was awful: a stranger pointing to weird scribbles on the blackboard and calling them letters and sounds. The worst part was having to color inside the lines. What was wrong with the outside? Providentially, somewhere in second grade the scribbles turned into words that I could read and from them on I loved the 3 R’s: Reading, Recess, and Returning home. Coloring inside the lines still escapes me.

Once I grasped how to read, the teacher would call on me to read three pages out loud while the worst reader got one paragraph. I was winded a lot of the time. I also became an expert at spelling which has served me well until recently when I’ve had to start looking up even the simplest words. The reading skills allowed me to mostly skip homework. And then I discovered that school prevented or delayed some of the drudgery at home like picking rocks and picking rocks. That’s when I became a big fan of the five-day school week! There weren’t four-day school weeks then or I would have been a lesser fan of them!

Kids today are still ambivalent about school. Let’s help them out this school year by driving really slow in school zones, predicting that they will be unpredictable in crossing streets, telling them that they will learn so much and do great in school this year, volunteering to help out at school, and making sure that every kid has a backpack!

Priscilla Martens