Mattituck family gears up for back to school

With a crisp in the air and a bouquet of freshly sharpened pencils on the horizon, summer’s stint has come to an end, with families gearing up for back to school next week. Many parents and students are itching for school to start, having exhausted all options for summer entertainment. 

The 2025-26 academic year promises new starts, new memories, new class superlatives and new course loads for North Fork students. It also bears a cost for families, shopping for new backpacks, new supplies and even new outfits to put the best foot forward in the new year.  

National reports show a spike in back-to-school spending due to the potential impacts of tariffs and inflation. Back in May, the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics reported a 9.4% increase in prices for educational books and supplies. The National Retail Federation estimated that shoppers with K-12 children are budgeting nearly $144 for school supplies.

Lisa Boyd, mother of Mattituck High School twin sophomores Alexander and Hannah, spoke with The Suffolk Times about the costs associated with their back to school hauls this year. 

The family spent roughly $200 at Staples, gathering a set of basics — pens, pencils, binders, paper and notebooks — a figure Ms. Boyd said was “less than years past” for the two students. 

“I feel like the teachers now aren’t dictating as much that you have to have this type of notebook, and they’re leaving it more up to the students to decide what’s best for their own personal organizational strategy,” Ms. Boyd said. 

Students at Mattituck High School haven’t received their list of supplies for classes yet, Ms. Boyd said, so additional needed supplies, such as course-specific calculators, could add to the school supply cost total in the coming weeks.

Between some new clothes and new sneakers for the twins and a new set of cleats for Hannah’s soccer season, the Boyd family spent several hundred dollars this year. However, since the start of the year will stay warm for a while before we’re all breaking out our sweaters, Ms. Boyd said a more extensive haul would be further down the line. 

“They’re wearing shorts and stuff, and I hesitate to buy anything real fall clothing wise because I don’t want them to outgrow it before they wear it,” Ms. Boyd said. “But we did go shopping and got a few new things.”

The teens are quite active with extracurriculars, jobs and community work — between NJROTC, Girl Scouts, soccer, sailing, historical society volunteer hours, theater and more activities split between the two. The busy schedule is something that’s almost a full-time job in itself, as Ms. Boyd works to figure out car pool schedules for different activities. 

Their packed schedules throughout the summer as teens is something that keeps them ready for the early morning alarms come Tuesday, Sept. 2 — a vast difference from preparing for the first days of elementary school. 

“They’re starting to make their mark on the world, really,” Ms. Boyd said. “They’re starting to do their own things, exploring their interests and seeing where that takes them — especially with them being twins, seeing how they each have their own directions they’re going in.”

New York students face a new challenge this year: keeping off their phones during school. The state-mandated bell-to-bell cellphone ban during the school day on school grounds goes into effect this September. Ms. Boyd expressed her support for the rule and said the family has had conversations about the mandate at home. 

“I think some parents were afraid of, if God forbid there was an emergency,” she said. “You know, there’s ways to communicate within the school if my kids really need to reach me.”

This regulation is something that might take students a while to get used to, many of them having gotten phones during the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown as a form of communication with one another, but it’s one that Ms. Boyd is supportive of to eliminate distractions during school. 

“I think kids want to do it on their own, but it’s hard for them,” Ms. Boyd said of the regulation. “So having a real policy that will help them put their phones down and talk to each other or interact more,” is something she supports.

The Suffolk Times invites families to send in pictures of their student’s best first day of school outfits to The CommPost with a short caption next week at suffolktimes.timesreview.com/the-commpost/.