The Backpacks Are Packed and the Bus Stops Are Coming Back to Life

On a kitchen table somewhere in Burlington County right now, there is a backpack that a seven-year-old has already tried on four times. It's too big for her — they always are in the first week — and she doesn't care even a little bit. That backpack is the whole future as far as she's concerned, and in a week or so she'll walk out the door wearing it, and her mother will stand in the driveway pretending she isn't crying. That scene is about to play out ten thousand times across South Jersey, and it never stops being the best thing I write about all year.

Check your own district's date

School is coming back. Across the region, most districts open the day after Labor Day — a wave of first bells landing in the September 3 range, with a few towns starting a touch earlier and a few a touch later, so every family's date is really their own district's date. Atlantic City students head back around September 1; a long list of Burlington County districts — Cinnaminson, Delran, Delanco, Bordentown Regional, Chesterfield — start September 3. Check your own calendar, because the difference between "school starts Tuesday" and "school starts next week" is the difference between a calm Sunday and a frantic one.

But I don't want to write a calendar. I want to write about the families, because the first day of school is never really about the children alone — it's about the whole household that gets them there. Behind every packed backpack is a parent who did the math on supply lists, a grandparent picking up the slack on the early-morning drop-off, a big brother showing a nervous kindergartner where the bus stops.

The first day of school is a community event disguised as an individual milestone.Emma Brooks

The most expensive stretch of the year

I'd be doing these families a disservice if I pretended the season was pure sweetness. Back-to-school is one of the most expensive stretches of the year, and it lands right as the summer's extra costs are still on the credit card. Supply lists have quietly grown longer and pricier; sneakers that fit in June don't fit in September; the fees and folders and fifteen-dollar glue sticks add up fast. For a lot of families living close to the line, "the kids go back to school" and "the budget gets tight" are the same sentence. This is precisely the season when the region's food pantries and school-supply drives do their quiet, heroic work.

If you have a little room this year, this is the moment it matters most. A pack of pencils, a sturdy backpack, a gift card slipped to a teacher who is — I promise you — about to spend her own money on her classroom. The generosity you show in the next two weeks lands directly on a specific kid who will feel, on the first day, that she has everything the other kids have. Summer's ending. The buses are rolling back out. Here's to a good year, kids. We're all pulling for you.

Based on reporting from AOL/South Jersey school-calendar listings, the New Jersey school calendar, and CBS News Philadelphia.